Web Cash

At least, that wasn’t my earlier problem.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that this site and Life of Brian were serving up nothing but Big Brother and Big Sister ads. This happened more or less at the same time that I experimented with putting some Adfly links around the site.

It turns out the problem wasn’t some kind of AdSense / AdFly rivalry at all. It was me, making a few changes to other advertising. I had been using ContextWeb (previously AdsDaq) to serve up some ads on these two websites.

The way the service worked, you got paid per impression. You set a PPM price (a bid, basically), and if there was an advertiser willing to pay it then the AdsDaq / ContextWeb ad showed. Otherwise, it defaulted to a “backup ad” – in this case, AdSense.

Well, these weren’t performing very well, so I turned them off. Apparently, when I paused the ads in the ContextWeb dashboard, that killed the script altogether. Instead of defaulting to the backup ads (AdSense), it just showed those public service ads. Doh…

I went back and put the AdSense ad scripts into the theme directly, and regular AdSense ads starting showing up again. It’s nice to know there’s no problem; it’s a bit annoying that it took me two weeks to figure out I was the problem.

I’ve been spending some time this week looking at new ways to monetize traffic – other advertising methods, new affiliate programs, etc. One thing I came across was Adfly. I’d seen it as a user before, but I’d never thought about using it…

Seemed simple enough. Shorten a URL, send people to it, make some cash on impressions.

This site and my other old blog both have a little bit of residual traffic that comes to them, despite the fact that I don’t really update them in any meaningful way. I figured if I added a few links to the end of each post (think related posts, with adfly links going to outside sources), I might be able to make a few bucks off those readers.

So I wrote up a short script, inserted it into both themes, and forgot about it for a few days. Today, I came back to look at something on the site and I noticed that all of my Adsense ads had changed to public service announcements (Big Brothers and Big Sisters, to be exact). The same thing had happened on both this domain and life-of-brian.com.

My other blog, the one that I still update and hadn’t put any Adfly links on, was still serving up regular Adsense ads. They’re all on the same Adsense account, too.

My guess, then, is that the crawler noticed the Adfly links and that flagged something in the system. Maybe there’s something in the Adsense ToS that I should have read before I tried this, oops. But keep in mind that if you try posting Adfly links on your legitimate Google AdSense website, you may jeopardize AdSense as a source of revenue. So you’d better make more money from those Adfly links than from the AdSense…

I came across this problem on the forums today. How can you randomize which Ad Sense ad to show using Javascript?

The solution, it turns out, is very simple.
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Widget Bucks is a relatively new ad network. At first glance, they appear to be a great alternative to Ad Sense – attractive ads, competitive eCPM rates, and CPM payment for non-US visitors.

After trying them out though, I found one aspect of their network – the CPM ads for foreign visitors – to be entirely disappointing.
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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.
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Google AdSense could be a great way to monetize your site. But if you’re CTR or eCPM is in the crapper, you may be looking for a new solution – an ad network that pays a decent flat rate per thousand impressions.

There are some reputable CPM programs out there (ValueClick seems to be among the best), but there are surely plenty of scams out there. I just read about one program – RevenueResponse – that seems like a site you should avoid using.
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Although Google Adsense is easy and convenient, it isn’t always the best choice for monetization. My click-through rate and eCPM is relatively low – but there are other methods to turn traffic into cash.

One method is to sell text link ads. A major ad group on this front is Text-Link-Ads. However, while I’m building up my pagerank, I decided to test out a different provider – TNX.
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If you operate a website (like this blog), Google Adsense is probably one of your main streams of revenue. Although you may eventually outgrow Adsense, chances are you’ll have used it at some point.

While looking through my Adsense stats, I noticed an odd trend. This trend suggested a few things about monetizing a site through Adsense – questions that I don’t have an answer for yet, but that I will be looking for.

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