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.

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.

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.

What is RevenueResponse?

I first read about RevenueResponse in a post on DigitalPoint. Someone politely spammed the forum with his referral link while telling us about this great new CPM program.

Up front, the program seems fantastic. They advertise a CPM rate of $5. However, you read the fine print and it tells you you’ll earn up to $5 per thousand impressions. There is also a click-through requirement – if you don’t meet a certain rate for a two week period, your account could get canned.

This is reasonable, though. A guaranteed $5 CPM is fairly unrealistic, and any reputable advertising network will want to make sure the ads are displayed in a visible and click-able location. But does the network pay?

Proof of Payment from RevenueResponse?

After a little searching on Google, I haven’t been able to find any instance of someone posting a proof of payment from RevenueResponse. One person claimed they “always paid on time” – but his entire article was basically an ad spot for RevenueResponse.

If he’s trying to get you to click on his referral link, he’ll obviously claim that they make payment on time.

In the DigitalPoint discussion, someone posted a link to one claim that RevenueResponse is a scam. This fellow claims he is owed $400+, that RevenueResponse kept delaying payment, and that he still hasn’t been paid.

I’m often skeptical of these scam stories. People have posted stories about how PayPal cheated them out of money – but I’ve never had a bad experience with them. However, without any confirmation of payment from another source I’m prepared to believe this guy and not waste my time with the Ad Network.

Beware the Adware and Spyware

Something else to beware of is that RevenueResponse (and other disreputable ad companies) may use your site to launch adware and spyware on your users’ computers.

One user on DigitalPoint that signed up – but apparently didn’t earn enough to get payment – claims that the ad code launched some adware. I don’t feel like signing up myself to verify this claim, but it’s another negative point for RevenueResponse.

Bottom line, this place doesn’t seem worth it. They advertise ridiculously high rates – which means they either fall short or use underhanded means (like not paying publishers or installing adware on the users’ computers) to make good. If you’re looking for a CPM ad network, go with a reputable one. Avoid this junk heap.

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.

On this and my other site (Babel), I use a few main types of ads – a horizontal image banner, a skyscraper with text and images, and square boxes with text and images.

It’s natural to wonder, “Which ad is the most efficient and most effective?”

Both of these sites are relatively new, so I don’t have a lot of data to work with. From the data that I do have, though, I’ve noticed a few key trends.

• The tall vertical skyscraper and the square blocks seem to have the best click-through rate
• The horizontal image banner (like the one in the header) seems to have a low click-through rate
• The tall vertical skyscraper and the square blocks seem to have lower pay-per-click values
• The horizontal image banner seems to have a much higher payout than the other two options

Like I said, I don’t have a whole lot of data to support these trends at the moment. Over the next month or two, I plan on watching these trends and testing them out (using random tests of text verse image ads).

It’s something to keep in mind, though. The horizontal image banner seems to be the most effective – the high payout makes up for the low click-through rate. Although I wouldn’t get rid of the other ads, it’s a good justification for making sure you have at least one horizontal image banner on your site.

Notice any trends in your own Adsense reports? I’d be interested to hear what other people have come up.