advertising

There’s always a danger when running ads on a site that the “magic pixie dust” will stick a wholly inappropriate ad just where you don’t want it. It’s happened to me on this blog before. A rant about people using fog lights when they shouldn’t left a raft of ads for people to go an buy fog lights!

On a more serious note, though, I’m sure Sky didn’t intend the following, especially when you read the last paragraph before the ad…

WidgetBucks have today announced the launch of their CPM product for non-US/Canadian site visitors.

As you may know if you read this blog frequently, I recently pulled WidgetBucks from my sites when they announced that site owners would only get paid for clicks originating from the US and Canada. That wasn’t much good for me, as around 75% of my traffic comes from the rest of the world (it’s a big place!).

Now, with a touch of geo-analysis, WidgetBucks will determine where a visitor comes from. If from the US/Canada, the “traditional” WidgetBucks ad will be shown. If not, they will display a CPM-based ad in its place. This sounds like a good solution to me and I’ve reinstated it on my blogs/sites. I hope the CTR returns to the pretty good level it was at before I decided to pull them.

Here’s some of their press release:

We are now serving CPM ads to the non-U.S./Canada traffic. This will give you revenue, per impression, for your site visitors who come from other countries. This is designed to help publishers who have a blend of traffic from a variety of countries.

Our system will do the geo-location for you, determining where the visitor is coming from. Then we’ll either show the regular pay-per-click widget (to visitors from the U.S. and Canada) or show an ad that pays per impression (to visitors from other countries).

In an earlier post I covered why I had pulled WidgetBucks from my blogs/sites (basically, you wouldn’t get any credit for any clicks originating from outside the US/Canada). Well, good news is coming, perhaps due to the number of people like myself who’d pulled it from their site(s)?

In December, WidgetBucks will be introducing a new widget. It will detect the geographical location of the visitor. If they are from the US/Canada, the “traditional” WidgetBucks widget we all know and love (ahem) will be displayed. If from another location, “then our system will determine a country- specific CPM ad to display.”.

This is potentially pretty good news. It was a tough decision to take down WidgetBucks as it generated a pretty good click through rate, but only for the 25% of my visitors that come from the US/Canada. Now it looks  like I might be putting it back on sometime soon.

There’s an interesting interview on ProBlogger today with Matt Hulett of WidgetBucks.

Of most interest to myself and, I would imagine, many others, is that “Starting tomorrow (Nov. 15), clicks coming from outside the U.S. and Canada on WidgetBucks widgets will no longer be charged to merchants, and therefore, no publisher credit will be given for those clicks. This will positively impact publisher RPC levels, and the change does not affect earnings from October (just posted) or the first half of November.” (quote taken from the WidgetBucks blog).

Seeing as the vast majority of my traffic does not originate from the US or Canada (there’s the entire rest of the planet out there, folks), with this single action, they have rendered their service all but useless on the 3 blogs I’ve tried it on. It’s really not worth the amount of space they consume for the very small amount I will now received from it. Now, I appreciate why they’re doing it from a business perspective, but it would’ve been nice if they’d at least warned us this might happen. It must have been foreseeable, surely?

Darren over on ProBlogger is giving it 24 hours, but I’ve decided to pull out now. It’s a real shame, as the CTR was pretty impressive, but the time has come to move on to another ad network.