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.

After trying them out though, I found one aspect of their network – the CPM ads for foreign visitors – to be entirely disappointing.

What’s Good About Widget Bucks?

At first glance, Widget Bucks seems great. The normal ads they serve – targeted product placement widgets – look terrific. In my opinion they are light-years beyond the typical, ugly, AdSense text ad.

While these ads are only displayed to US and Canadian visitors, word is that the eCPM for the ads can be quite high. If your site can successfully integrate the Widget Bucks ads – and most of your visitors are from North America – the ad network can be great.

The Problem For Foreign Visitors

I recently realized that this site has a large base of foreign visitors. Roughly 1/3 of the visits come from North America – the rest are spread throughout the world, mainly Europe and Asia. When I saw that Widget Bucks was advertising a fixed CPM rate for foreign visits, I thought it would be great.

They geo-target the ads for specific countries. I thought this meant there would be targeted ads – for example, French ads for French visitors. I also thought there would be a decent CPM – at the very least $1-2.

If that was the case, I’d gladly swap out the sub-par AdSense banner in my header for a banner Widget.

If It’s Too Good To Be True…

After testing out one of the Widget Bucks widgets and researching the topic a bit more, it turns out that for sites with a non-US visitors, Widget Bucks is a horrible service.

I was searching for some estimates on the CPM of these ads, when I came across this description of the type of ads shown to non-US visitors.

It turns out that Widget Bucks hasn’t got a real advertiser base for these visitors – so they’re serving up crappy ads like, “You’re the 999,999th visitor to this site!” You know, the hideous ads that should have become extinct long ago.

One strike for Widget Bucks.

The author of that article also reported that he’d earned a whopping $0.01 for the impressions that he’d shown the Widget. This prompted me to check my own earnings, and with 500 impressions yesterday, I’ve earned a whopping $0.01 as well. Bleh.

Check Back In a Few Months

I still like the idea of Widget Bucks, and I may check back in a few months. Supposedly they’re working on building up a bigger base of advertisers, and it’s conceivable that this will improve both the type of ads and the payment for those ads.

At the moment, though, steer away from this service if you have a base of non-US visitors. The regular Widgets look awesome, but you’ll be wasting your time displaying the CPM ads for mere pennies.

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.

If you’re not familiar with AC, here’s a quick rundown of how it works. You write an article which you can either submit for up front payment (in which you get paid ~3-8 bucks if they like it) or you can bypass the review process and get published immediately (without upfront payment).

Either way, once your article is published you earn a revenue share (Performance Payment, $1.50 per 1000 page views). The good thing about skipping the up front payment is you can post articles that advertise your site – without it getting reviewed and picked over.

Although most of my AC articles are strictly for content, I have created a few as an experiment for gaining backlinks and traffic. Here’s what I typically do.

I identify a topic on one of my sites that I’ve written a few articles on (3-4). Then I write a brief “Guide” article that gives the reader an overview of the topic. I dedicate one to two paragraphs to the sub-topics that each of my pages targets, and I include a link to my content page so that the reader can get more information.

You can see an example with this article on graphic organizers. It targets three content pages that I wrote on my other website (Babel). It also gives the user some useful information.

I originally tried this strictly as a method to gain backlinks. On that grounds, it definitely worked. I included four links to my site – one to the front page and three to individual content pages. They were indexed quickly and picked up by the search engines.

The unintended consequence of this is that it directed a bit of traffic to my site, too. It’s by no means a vast amount of traffic, but every little bit counts. In the past week, that article sent 21 visits to my site – a couple of visits per day (see the Google Analytics screenshot).

Doesn’t sound like a lot, but consider this. If you write ten guide articles that get an average of ten click throughs per week – that’s another 400 visits per month. On top of that, you’ll get 30-40 backlinks with keywords that you chose to best benefit your site.

This seems like a great tool for promoting your site – especially a relatively new site. You can get optimized backlinks, you can drive some traffic, and you even get income from Associated Content if people do read your article.

Get paid for advertising your own site? I don’t think it gets any better than that. Go sign up for Associated Content and write a few stump articles yourself.