AdMoolah News and Views

You may have heard Pixelotto.com, which is set to launch tomorrow. If you haven’t heard, pixelotto is the next scheme from Alex Tew, who created the Million Dollar Homepage. This time he is doing something similar. He is auctioning off a million pixels worth of ads, this time at $2.00 a pixel. The difference this time is that there is a “lotto” attached to the page. Users who click on the ads have a chance of winning 1,000,000 dollars. That’s right, once the whole $2,000,000 worth of pixels is sold, some lucky user will get $1,000,000 of it. He is also giving $100,000 to charity. Leaving himself a tidy $900,000 minus expenses. Not bad, and I think it will work too.

The warning is for people who are considering buying advertising on your site. The traffic that you get from this is going to be pure garbage. People will be click the ads and not caring at all what is on the other side of the link. None of the traffic is going to convert. This will be the equivalent of the garbage traffic that pay-to-surf programs bring. If you are running an ad program like AdSense or YPN, there is a good chance you could get banned from attracting this type of traffic. So, if you do advertise with pixellotto, make sure not to put AdSense or YPN (or any other ad network that cares about quality of traffic) on your landing page.

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On one of my sites I have been running Google Analytics and have some custom JavaScript installed to allow me to track which visitors click on the ads on my site. On this site I run a combination of AdSense and YPN ads. I have also been running some AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns. Here is a chart showing the percentage of visitors who click on ads broken out by the major sources of traffic. Note that this isn’t a page CTR, it is the CTR of a user in the entire visit.

Not surprisingly, people who come to the site by clicking a YSM or AdWords ad have a greater tendency to click ads on the site. What did surprise me was the huge variance between the search engines. People coming from AOL are almost twice as likely to click on ads as people who use Google. MSN users are also as likely to click on ads as AOL users, while Yahoo users were similar to Google users in click behavior. I think this is because AOL andMSN users are not as Web savvy as Yahoo and Google users, and less experienced surfers tend to click more ads then experienced web surfers.

This data is important in running CPC advertising campaigns. I can easily figure out an average Revenue-Per-Visitor (RPV) for my site, but I had no idea how much more valuable visitors from pay per click campaigns were from regular surfers. I can now take into account how much more money I make from visitors from the ad campaigns to adjust my minimum bids. For example, lets say my RPC is $0.10 (it’s not). I also know that AdWords visitors are 20% more likely to click on ads then regular visitors, so I make an average of $0.12 from them. This allows me to bump up my minimum bids a little in AdWords while still being confident I am making money from them.

I’m also thinking that this type of data might be good for fine tuning ad placement. If AOL and MSN users are more likely to click on ads, why not adjust the placement and color of the ads to make them more prominent for these users? Since Google and Yahoo users are a little more ad phobic, it might make sense to make the placement and color of the ads a little more subtle.

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This is a paid review of PaidQuick.com. (As usual, I only review products or services that are relevant to AdMoolah and that I would probably review anyway.)

ParkQuick.com is a site that offers recommendations and reviews of domain parking services. Domain name parking is used when you have bought a domain, but have not yet actually hosted a web site on it. The domain parking services put ads on the parked domain that will earn you money when people visit the domain.

There are a couple of ways people may visit parked domains. If you buy a domain name that used to have a site on it, but the domain name has expired, there will still be links to the domain, and people may still have the domain bookmarked. If you have not set up hosting at the site yet, they will simply see a “Server Not Found” message when they visit the site. The other way people visit parked domain is called “type in traffic”. This happens when people type the domain name into the address bar of the browser. If you sign up for a domain parking service, these visitors will see ads instead. Depending on the service, you get paid for these ads on a CPC or CPM basis. Usually the payouts are pretty low compared to the payout on real, active sites. Because the payouts are so low, people who use these type of ads usually either have a very large amount of domains (hundreds of them) or have domains that are often typed into the browser address bar.

What PaidQuick does is have a directory of all the various domain parking services that you can sign up for. If you have parked domains, this is probably a pretty good place to start investigating the monetization of these sites.

The following is a paid review of ReviewMe

ReviewMe is now taking registrations for advertisers and bloggers.

Overall I think it is a pretty good concept and it seems like an easy way for bloggers to make some money. The basic idea is that advertisers pay bloggers to write about a product. Unlike some similar services, this one forces bloggers to disclose that a review has been paid for. Since this blog is all about monetization and ad networks, I would have been writing about this anyway, this just gives me a chance to make a couple of bucks for it.

The sign up is pretty quick and easy. Once you have an account you can register up to six blogs. Each blog gets a rating based on Alexa, Technorati and estimated RSS subscribers. Blog acceptance seems pretty instantaneous.

I signed up this blog and it got a two out of five star rating. This set the price for a review on the blog at $60, with my payout being $30 if I write a review for somebody. Right now when you sign up you automatically get a chance to write a review of ReviewMe and you will get paid the standard payout for the review. (That’s what this review is.) They are going to keep offering this opportunity until they have paid out $25,000.

The only conditions for a review are that you disclose that it is a paid review, and that the review is at least 200 words.

I did a quick search of the blogs available for advertisers, and it seems like there are currently only 3. AdMoolah was the most expensive at $60 dollars, while the other two were proced at $40. I’m sure that will change quickly as bloggers sign up and write the paid reviews of ReviewMe.

So, if you have a blog I would recommend you sign up and write a review of ReviewMe for some quick cash.

Publishers can now sign up for Turn’s advertising network. As I mentioned a few days ago, it might be good competition for AdSense and YPN. It’s a contextual ad network, but unlike their main competitors, it uses CPA instead of CPC. For publishers concerned about low revenues from CPA ads, they have this to say:

At Turn we want the ads on your site to perform as much as you do. So, unlike a traditional CPA network, Turn uses a unique bidded CPA pricing model with effective CPM (eCPM) ranking to ensure you receive the highest performing ads on your site.

What I assume that means is they take every ads payout, multiply it by the CTR and the conversion rates it gets, and the ads that come out the highest are shown.

I signed up for it, but haven’t been accepted yet. They don’t mention any acceptance criteria, but they did ask what sites you have and how many unique visitors and pageviews your sites get. I’ll be sure to let you know my impressions of it if I am able to use it.

LinkBucks is an interesting new advertising network that is currently in beta. They are different from other ad networks because you don’t place the ads on you own site – the ads are displayed after an outgoing link is clicked.

There are two options for displaying ads, intermission links, and top banner links. An intermission link will display an ad before the site that is linked to is displayed. The ads stay up for 5 seconds or until the user clicks a “continue” button. Top banner links display a banner ad in a frame above the site being linked to.

Here is an example intermission link.

Here is an example top banner link.

Creating these links is pretty easy, you just give them the link and they give you a new URL to substitute. You can also include some JavaScript that will convert all the links on a page to LinkBicks links. This JavaScript method also allows you to exclude specific links from being converted. They allow you to choose whether you want an intermission or top banner ad, and whether you want a clean or adult ad to be displayed.

The payout is done on a CPM basis. They pay $1.00 US for every 5000 top banner ad impressions, and $1.00 US for every 3500 intermission ad impressions.

There is a new payout rate table, which will go into effect early next week. This makes the payments even lower than they were before.

Tier	Top Frame Rate	Intermission Rate	Countries
1	1$ / 9,400	1$ / 3,500	United States(US)
2 (Teir 1 + 30% more clicks)	1$ / 12,220	1$ / 4,550	Canada(CA), United Kingdom(GB)
3 (Teir 1 + 60% more clicks)	1$ / 15,040	1$ / 5,600	France(FR), Germany(DE), Italy(IT), Netherlands(NL), Spain(ES)
4 (Teir 1 + 85% more clicks)	1$ / 17,390	1$ / 6,475	Australia(AU), Austria(AT), Belgium (BE), Denmark(DK), Finland(FI), Iceland(IS), Ireland(IE),Mexico(MX), New Zealand(NZ), Norway(NO), Portugal(PT), Singapore(SG), Sweden(SE), Switzerland(CH)
5 (Currently will not pay)	–	–	All other countries We are working hard to try and supply ads to Asia and other low ad earning countries

They minimum payout is just $5.00 and they pay via Paypal or EPassPorte.

I think this is a fairly innovative way to monetize your site, but I’m also afraid it would annoy users quite a bit. I won’t be using it on all my outgoing links, that’s for sure, but I may experiment with it in a few places where it might make sense.

Found via: SEOMoz

In February, there was buzz that Turn.com was going to launch an AdSense competitor. They are going to have an official launch tomorrow at the Web 2.0 conference.

An Adweek article discusses some of the details.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Turn in recent months has attracted $18 million in venture backing from Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital and Shasta Ventures. Turn has about 1,000 advertisers in its system, which displays ads on approximately 30 sites.

1,000 advertisers seems like a pretty good size for a beta. Of course one of the keys to competing at the same level as Google is to have a lot more advertisers. Hopefully there will be enough buzz about them to get advertisers interested. There are some difference with AdSense that may be appealing:

Unlike Google, which charges advertisers on a per-click basis, Turn relies on a cost-per-action scheme.

and,

Turn has another key point of differentiation: It analyzes 60 factors to decide which ads to show users, weighing variables such as past behavior, publisher demographics, copy contents and brand quality.

These differences sound interesting enough to get advertisers to be interested.

Of course, it remains to be seen what the publisher side of things will look like. No word yet on if they will allow the same type of self-service system that ad networks like AdSense and YPN have. Hopefully we’ll have a good alternative very soon.

Found via: John Battelle’s SearchBlog

ReviewMe, which I have mentioned before, is a new revenue opportunity for bloggers. Bloggers write reviews of products or services, and they get paid for them. They are launching on November 9th.

They have just announced that:

When we launch, we’re going to give away $25K USD. Here’s how: every new blogger accepted into the ReviewMe network will immediately have the opportunity to earn cash by reviewing ReviewMe itself. This gives new reviewers a chance to see exactly how our system works, and helps spread the word about ReviewMe, too (good or bad). This offer will be in effect until we have paid out $25,000 total for reviews.

This looks like a good way for bloggers to make a few bucks if they don’t mind posting paid reviews. Look for a paid review of ReviewMe 0n this blog next week

Search Engine Roundtable today had a post about some free coupons for CPC advertising.

Get $50 in your account when you sign up for a new advertiser at MSN’s adCenter and Google’s AdWords.

PDF file of $50 Coupon for adCenter. Note that these are good for US residents only.
Form to receive a $50 coupon for AdWords. I’m not sure what restrictions this coupon has.

If you’ve never tried advertising before, this is a good chance to do so. If you manage to get $0.05 clicks, you can get 2000 targeted visitors for $10.00. Not a bad deal.

Note that both adCenter and AdWords have $5.00 USD activation fees that need to be paid.

Google has announced a new Custom Search Engine.

Similar products have been available from other companies for some time. There is Rollyo, Eurekster’s Swicki and Yahoo Search Builder. They all basically offer a customizable search engine by allowing you to enter a series of URLs that will be searched. This allows for the building of verticalsearch engines. For example, if you wanted to build a custom search engine for remote control cars, you can enter the URLs of all you favorite remote control car sites, and the search will select pages just from those URLs.

Google’s offering has a pretty good combination of features, compared to the others, including:

• Unlimited URLs. You can enter in as many URLs to include in the search results as you like.
• The ability to monetize the searches. You can provide your AdSense publisher ID and the search will be just like AdSense for Search.
• It allows you to specify if you want to only search in those URLs, or gives those URLs preference over all the others.

For some more opinions on Google’s Custom Search Engine, see Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Aaron Wall and JenSense.