gHacks technology news » blog revenue http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:22:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 The Rubicon Project http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/28/the-rubicon-project/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/28/the-rubicon-project/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:59:11 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/28/the-rubicon-project/ The Rubicon Project is yet another service like Pubmatic that tries to optimize your ad inventory on your website. They do this by testing different kinds of ads from different advertising companies in the ad spots on your website which has the result that ads generating maximum profits are displayed after a while.

There are however several differences between the Rubicon Project and Pubmatic which are worth noting. When I first joined Pubmatic I was turned off by the fact that I had to add my username and password for all the advertising companies that I did work with and that I had to sign up for all that I was not a member of yet.

This required a huge portion of trust on my side which I was not able to give at that time. I did not want to give away my login details which basically could be used to change account details like payment address. I therefor never tried out Pubmatic.

The Rubicon Project does not have this requirement. They use existing accounts for sites that generate less than 300000 impressions per day. This has several advantages. First, I do not have to give them my existing login information which is great. Second I do get paid by Paypal or Check from one company and not from several. I also see all the stats and performance in one place instead of having to log into several websites to check the performance of my ads.

Third, I do not have to join networks that I’m no member of yet and finally I can use advertisers that are not available yet in my country. This means that it is for instance possible to have YPN (Yahoo Ads) displayed on your website even if you do not have a US-American SSID. That’s the theory at least because I can currently select only a handful of networks from the list of advertising networks listed on their website.

A quick chat with the excellent support revealed that the Network Directory contained most known advertising networks and that users could comment and rate them even if they have not been added yet to the Rubicon Project. Plans are to add as many advertisers from that list before the commercial release in 2008.

I’m currently using ads from their website to fill as second tier for certain ad spots on my website and will report back when I have some data that I can share. Here is a short list of changes that I would like to see:

  • Create Ad Zones and disable certain networks on those zones. Currently a network can only be disabled for all ad spots.
  • Faster reporting times. They are updated once a day only but they will most likely fix this before they leave Beta
  • More Advertisers. Some heavyweight advertisers are missing currently. Those are YPN, Tribalfusion, Burst Media and others that I use on my website currently
  • Make it clearer that users have to select ad colors themselves and make it possible to use different colors for different ad zones.

    • I heard about the Rubicon Project at Connected Internet. Make sure you check this awesome blog out and add it to your RSS Reader.

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    ]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/28/the-rubicon-project/feed/ 0 A second look at TNX http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/14/a-second-look-at-tnx/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/14/a-second-look-at-tnx/#comments Sun, 14 Oct 2007 09:03:45 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/14/a-second-look-at-tnx/ I recently discovered TNX which is a web service similar to Text Link Ads. TNX is a link broker selling links on every single page of your website or blog if their script is installed on those sites. Users get paid in points for links which can be anywhere from 1 point to a several thousand depending on the Pagerank and the backlinks of the website the links are placed on.

    Points can be in turn used to buy links for your websites or cashed out. The current exchange rate is $0.63 for 1000 points. PR4 pages at Ghacks generate 3750 points which equals roughly $2.36 per month for that page. A PR5 page would earn double that amount per month.

    If you compare the prices to Text Link Ads you see that you could earn more money from TNX especially if you take into consideration that up to 4 links can be played on every page of your website.

    I have currently earned 75000 points with Ghacks which is about $50. It takes some time until links have been placed on all pages. I currently have links on about 40 pages which is not much. I do delete all links on PR0 pages because this earns me just 7.5 points which is next to nothing in my opinion. 1000 Links on PR0 pages would earn me $5 which is ridiculous. So, all PR0 links get deleted.

    My estimation is that I could earn about $300 per month from playing one link on every page that has a Pagerank greater than 0 or $1200 if I go for the overkill and place four links on each page.

    Points can also be sold in webmaster forums and in the forum at TNX which unfortunately has no activity at all at the moment. I suppose you could try and sell points at forums like Digitalpoint or Namepros instead for a better conversion rate than $0.63 because webmasters buying links do pay $1.2 for 1000 points at the moment.

    Read More:

    TNX

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    ]]>     http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/14/a-second-look-at-tnx/feed/ 0     My Blog Earnings for July 2007 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/01/my-blog-earnings-for-july-2007/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/01/my-blog-earnings-for-july-2007/#comments Wed, 01 Aug 2007 04:49:34 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/01/my-blog-earnings-for-july-2007/ July has passed pretty quickly for me with two vacations and it was a rather unspectacular month in regards to ghacks as well. My earnings remained pretty stable throughout the month with the usual fluctuation in Adsense earnings. I’m really not sure why the difference between the worst day (Saturday, July 14, 2007 – 2,44% of my Adsense earnings) and the best day (Sunday, July 15, 2007 – 3,97% of my Adsense earnings) was so immense considering that the best day followed the worst day immediately.

    Review Me which made up about 7% of my earnings in June went down to 0% this time because I got no new review orders in July. This was not as worth as it sounds because Tribalfusion finally kicked of with Evertons great advice to change the format of the banner at the bottom to a rectangle.

    I’m still trying to get a little bit more diversity into my earnings with the goal that my Adsense earnings drop below 50% while keeping the money earned stable. I think I will have to test a few schemes and get rid of some that do not make that much sense anymore.

    I want to concentrate on direct ad sales as well because this is something that I have been neglecting for a very long time. The stats from last month showed for instance that both Evertons and John Chows direct ad sales made up 9,11% and 11,45% of their total earnings while mine remained at 0,33%.

    Here are my blog earnings for July 2007: (brackets June 2007)

    Google Adsense 58,37% (58,95%)
    Google Adsense Referrals 2,36% (2,79%)
    Google Adsense Search 0,35% (0,17%)
    Text Link Ads 4,90% (3,78%)
    Review Me 0,00% (7,30%)
    Tribalfusion 9,19% (3,87%)
    Intellitxt 24,81% (22,45%)
    Direct Ad Sales 0,33% (0,64%)

    To sum up my plans for August 2007:

    + Focus on direct ad sales
    + Remove Adsense Search and install a better search
    + Get rid of Feedburner Ads in Feeds (done)
    + Try out some selected affiliate programs to diversify my income

    How was the June 2007 for you ?

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