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.

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.
(more…)

You may have stumbled upon the section on writing for Associated Content – for money.

But even if you’re not interested in being published on someone else’s site, AC can be a great tool for you as a webmaster. You can use it to get optimized backlinks and targeted traffic.
(more…)