widgetbucks

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.

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.