Web Cash

Update: I no longer feel comfortable recommending TNX as an ad broker. Check my more recent post about how TNX links could damage your Google traffic.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I was looking into using TNX as a text link ad network. This is basically a way to make money off of your sites link popularity and pagerank - regardless of click-through rates and traffic.

After some more research, I think I’ve got a better idea of the potential of TNX - and I’m liking it more. Let’s take a look at potential earnings on the site.

What Are TNX Points?

When you sell ads on TNX, you aren’t paid directly in cash. You’re paid in TNX points. These are the same points that the advertisers use (after buying in) to purchase ads.

Purchasing these points can cost about $1.50 to $0.75 per 1,000 - depending on the bulk in which you buy them. This also gives you an idea of what you can sell them for if you have a potential buyer.

If you don’t want to market the points to other companies yourself, you can arrange to have TNX buy them out. The current rate is $0.74 per 1,000 points, although you can get $0.78 per 1,000 points if you meet certain requirements in link placement.

The bottom line is - as you earn points, you’ll be able to cash them in for about $0.75 per 1,000 points.

The Real Question: How Many Points Do I Get?

In order to figure out how much you can earn, the real question is - how many points can I generate with my site?

To begin answering that question, we need to look at how TNX sets up its link pricing structure - which determines how many points you’ll get for those links. TNX uses two different methods to rate your site - Google Page Rank and Yahoo Backlinks.

If you have signed up for TNX, you can go to the “Create a Campaign” option to see the following information. Your site is ranked in one of five Yahoo Backlinks categories - 0 - 500, 500 - 5,000, 5,000 to 50,000, 50,000 to 250,000, and 250,000 and up. Your site is also ranked by Pagerank - 0 to 7.

When you look at the Pagerank chart, TNX advertises the “lowest” price of a link for one of those sites. At a Pagerank 0 site, a link will cost a base of 1 point. They also state that the price of an actual link can cost up to 20 times more than that base price. This extra cost comes from two places - the site’s category and the site’s Yahoo Backlinks.

Based on my own experience, I can do a little estimation of what a link is worth.

When I first signed up, my site was Pagerank 0 and in the 0 - 500 Yahoo Backlinks Category. My site’s topic category is “Web Development,” which has a price ranking of two dollar signs (out of a max of three dollar signs). At this point, my links were selling for 3 points.

Now, my site has jumped into the next Yahoo Backlinks category. The links now sell for 6 points.

This leads me to believe that TNX has a basic pricing structure set up like this:

Actual Point Price =
  Basic Price (Page Rank) * Category Price Modifier * Yahoo Backlinks Modifier

For a PR 0 site, the base price is 1. My site was selling links for 3 points, so I would assume that the “Category Price Modifier” for a two-dollar-sign category is 3 points. The Yahoo Backlinks Modifier seems to be just 1 - 5 - based on which category you’re in. Therefore the highest earning potential for my site - while it’s still Pagerank 0 - is 18 points per link.

What does that work out to? With 200 pages of content and one link per page, that’s about 3600 points per month… or $3.00. Doh.

Climbing the Pagerank Mountain

For a Pagerank 0 site, the earning potential seems pretty slim. Of course, this should be expected - since TNX is basically selling Pagerank.

As your Pagerank climbs, your potential earnings jump dramatically. A Pagerank 1 page has a base price of 50. That’s 50 times the base price of a Pagerank 0 site. That boosts your maximum potential earnings to $150.00 per month for a PR 1 site with 200 links.

A Pagerank 2 site has a base price of 100 points, and a Pagerank 3 site has a base price of 200 points. These are pretty reasonable Pageranks for a site that’s been operating for a few months. At that point, you’ve got some decent revenue potential with TNX.

A Reasonable Estimate for PR2 and 2,500 Backlinks

Let’s say you’ve built a new site. It went up a few months ago and Google finally did a Pagerank update. Your site has a Pagerank of 2 and a little over 2,500 Yahoo Backlinks. If you’ve been diligently adding content to your site, you should also have at least 300 pages (including category, index, and tag pages) to post links on.

Based on my estimates, the price for a link for this site would be 100 (Base) * 3 (Category) * 2 (Yahoo Backlinks) = 600. Let’s assume we place two links on each page - 2 (Links) * 300 (Pages) * 600 (Price) = 360,000 points. 360 * $0.75 (Cost per 1,000 point) = $270 per month.

This could be increased by adding up to 4 links per page, upping the Yahoo Backlinks to 5,000, or adding more content. Remember that this is just some conjecture and estimation - if you’re using TNX I’d be interested to hear about the link prices for your site so I can get some more accurate calculations.

I’d say that’s not bad for a couple of links on a page. Add that to a successful AdSense or other Ad Campaign, and you’re site should have a decent revenue stream.

Tags: ads, backlinks, earnings, tnx