Thoughts on WidgetBucks

I’ve been trying out WidgetBucks on a few of my blogs for the past few weeks. If you’ve not heard of them before, they’re a fairly new company that lets you create an advertising widget to place on your blog or web site - look at the sidebar here on Psionmark for an example.

Widget creation is pretty straightforward. You specify the size and colour of your widget, then tell it the category of items you’d like to appear in the widget, or tell it to automatically select items based on the content of your site/blog. Once you’ve finished creating it, simply drop the supplied code into your page and you’re set.

Clickthrough rates have been pretty good. On one of my sites, I’ve seen as high as 10%, which is better than any other product I’ve tried. One nice little incentive is that they’re offering a $25.00 bonus for new signups. Once you’ve received $25.00 from the ad placements, they’ll add the $25.00 bonus to your account.

Despite this, I’ve decided to, at least for now, remove it from my most popular blog. There are 2 main reasons for this:

1. The ads shown are not particularly relevant to the content of the blog
2. Speed. These widgets slow down the page load way too much. I was taking a hit of more than 10 seconds which, frankly, is not acceptable

This is a shame, as the ads themselves look pretty slick and I think they draw the eye of readers, which is a good thing. I’m going to leave them in place for now on my other lower traffic sites and I’ll keep an eye on their performance. If I see a sudden improvement in either speed or number of categories - or preferably both - I’ll reconsider them for my main site.