WidgetBucks Does Not Make The Cut
Like everyone else on the internet, last week a I gave the highly-hyped WidgetBucks a try at the site. I was a bit skeptical about how well it would perform because I know that in general visitors to my site aren’t interested ‘flashy’ looking ads. Image ads or anything other than plain text-ads generally perform very poorly.
I created a few different widgets and placed them in various areas throughout the site. On most pages I manually selected categories that related to the content of page I placed the widgets on. On a few pages I choose “MerchSense” to allow the WidgetBucks bot to crawl my site and choose a category based on the content of the page. It appears that the MerchSense-bot is either retarded, broken or very slow because all it ever displayed were the standard Digital camera listings.
After a few days my results were less than impressive: Approximately 10,000 impressions and 3 clicks with a grand-total in earnings of…. drumroll…. $0.20
I’m not saying that WidgetBucks is a bad system – As a matter of fact, if your niche is shopping, ‘gadgets’, or anything like that I’m sure that WidgetBucks would perform great. The key is that I like to try everything at the site to learn what does or does not work. Most new things do not work, but every once in a while I’ll get a nice surprise like I did with Kontera and paid-subscriptions.
Hi, why don’t you have Kontera anymore on your blog?
Thanks for the heads up on WidgetBucks, I even haven’t heard of its release. I don’t have shopping based websites though.
Take that back, I see you’ve hunted down every advertising from your blog!
http://success.grownupgeek.com/index.php/2007/08/23/is-your-favorite-blogger-an-ad-whore/
James said:
..Because i’m not a blogging Ad-Whore (anymore).. I have set myself free from the surly bonds of advertising in my blog.. Read why HERE
You make some good points. I think WidgetBucks will do very well on shopping and gadget sites. A good way of giving people a link to the product(s) that you are talking about.
Yes, its not for me too..
Tried it with Technology ReDiscussed..
It works on my gadget blog.
As many others I have used this and I must say I have a very nice amount I just hope that they stick to it and pay me up when it’s time. I have a very very hight traffic site with 8k uniques a day, and once I moved servers from Mediatemple to hostgator site was featured on digg the first 3 hours the DNS resolved hostgator couldn’t keep up and well shut down every site on the server. Moved back to media temple again, last 5 days have made 500+ and a very nice amount of referrals so far I am good with it, as long as they pay me I won’t have any problems with them.
Like you said, it is better for sites that sell products or reviews them…you cant say they suck just because they dont work on your site….
Just my .02