WidgetBucks Removed from This Site

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

I've been trying out different advertisers on this website, WidgetBucks being one of them. The hope is that, one day, this website will cover its own hosting costs. As of yesterday, WidgetBucks is no longer active on this website. This was done because WidgetBucks popped up a message saying that they were going to disable the account in three days because it was failing to meet "minimum requirements," as outlined in the terms and conditions. I checked the terms and conditions, and there was nothing there that I had failed to meet; they didn't even have minimum revenue requirements. Rather than try to fight the decision, I decided to pull all of their advertisements off this site for the following reasons:

• The revenue was extremely poor, averaging just one click per month,
• WidgetBucks is very North America centric, whereas this website's visitors are spread out globally,
• Visitors from most countries get very low quality CPM (Cost per thousand impression) advertisements (e.g., those annoying flashing "you are the 1,000,000th person to see this" advertisements), and
• Most advertisements were completely irrelevant to my website's content, and thus served only as a waste of space.

Given all of the above, I decided that WidgetBucks was not worth continuing with. It may work well for sites with primarily North American visitors, who are interested in buying MP3 players and/or printer cartriges, but for other sites, it is likely to perform poorly. Irrelevance was the same reason that I ditched Bidvertiser months ago.

At present, this website still uses two advertising services, Adbrite, and Chitika. Adbrite's advertisements are still marginally relevant but, I can (and do) reject advertisements, and people can purchase advertisements to run on this website simply by clicking the "Your Ad Here" link below the banners.

Most visitors will probably have never seen Chitika advertisements, because they only show up when someone from a supported country (currently only the USA and Canada, but they plan to expand) arrives at a page via a serach engine. The advertisements are tailored to what they are seraching for (so it's likely to be relevant to them). Everyone else (including regular visitors) don't see the advertisement. Despite showing only to American and Canadian visitors who arrived via search engines, Chitika is currently outperforming Adbrite. This is most likely due to the advertisements being shown by Chitika being relevant to what visitors are searching for.

This website is still far from covering its own server costs from advertising. With an average of about 100 page views per day, this is not surprising. Daily page views should be in the thousands or higher in order for advertising revenues to reach a meaningful level.

Comments (0) | 25 November 2009