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The Rubicon Project

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:59:11 +0000

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.

Breakdown of Blog Earnings

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:34:16 +0000

Once in a while I do post about my blog earnings on this blog. I still do not like to post exact figures although it would give me some credibility with the blog community who seem to put those into higher regard that earn a lot of money with their blogs. Still, you would not tell someone you hardly knew how much you’d earn in your job either, would not you ?

This post describes the progress of monetizing Ghacks and will hopefully encourage others and probably give at least some readers new ideas on what they could do to monetize their blog or website.

I’m basically using three monetization concepts here at Ghacks. The first is Pay Per Click which makes up the majority of my earnings, then there is Pay Per Impression and last but not least we have Affiliate Sales.

Pay Per Click

I’m using Google Adsense which has been my major source of income for a very long time side by side with Vibrant Medias Intellitxt service. Google Adsense was on a decline ever since Google changed the clickable area of their ads while Intellitxt is on a huge rise. It gets even better, Vibrant Media pays in Euro, one of the few advertising companies that do. This is very helpful and a good counterweight to the decreasing value of the Dollar in the world. Both make up roughly 80% of my blogs earnings.

Pay Per Impression

This is something that I’m exploring lately and I had good results with Tribalfusion. They make up roughly 10% of my blogs earnings which is ok for impression based services. I read about chaining just lately and signed up for Burst Media and Vizi as well to chain advertisements.

Let me explain what that means. The companies are not able to fill out all of your inventory with ads. Good companies fill 50%+ of the inventory with ads and display default ads (or none) if they can’t fill the ad spot with an ad.

Instead of displaying none paying default ads or no ads webmasters began to chain services and put them into tiers. So, if Tribalfusion can’t serve the ad they send the request to Burst who fill the ad or, if they cannot, send it to Vizi to fill the ad.

This makes it possible to create a higher fill rate for your ad inventory and earn money in the process.

Direct Advertisement is normally impression based as well and this is an area where I really have to do more. I made a contact with the nice guys of Ciao who ordered an ad placement for six months but this is just a tiny deal, nothing big. The deal was made after I contacted them asking if they wanted to advertise on my website.

My plans are to create a list of possible advertisers first and write 2-3 emails each day. I don’t have that much experience in writing sales letters but I will learn that as well I think.

Affiliate Earnings

This is not really working for my blog. Earnings are neglectable except for the earnings of the Giganews affiliate program which is earning a good amount of money if you consider that I mention it only in a few posts on my site.

To Do:

Direct Advertisement is the key to go. I’m at a cap with all advertisements on my site and only new traffic sources would raise the amount of money that I earn from this website. (I’m currently testing something that will drive more traffic to my blog, I will probably write about it if it is indeed successful).

The big advantage of Direct Advertisement is that the webmaster keeps all the money. There is no third party that gets a piece of the cake. It’s more work though and pretty hard to convince companies to advertise on a website directly.

Looking For:

I’m looking for someone who has experience in making direct advertisement deals with companies. A few friends of mine would join the party with their successful blogs as well and you would earn a percentage of every direct advertisement deal that you make.

Monetize your website with TNX ads

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 16:17:10 +0000

I heavily rely on Everton from Connected Internet who sends me new interesting ways to monetize my sites from time to time. Today he was sending me a link and a short description of TNX which basically sells links on your website. Unlike other sites that sell links the links from TNX are sold on a per page basis. Every sold page earns the user points which can be either exchanged into cash or used to buy links as well.

The value of a link depends on the pagerank of the site, the total amount of incoming links, the category of the website and the number of outgoing links. A calculator on the TNX website gives webmasters a rough idea on how much they could make from TNX with their site.

The amount of backlinks is fetched automatically. Webmasters need to edit the website category and amount of pages that have a certain pagerank. Ghacks for instance has a link popularity of 99862 and 2290 pages. At the beginning all those pages were assigned a pagerank of 0 which resulted in a monthly income of $10.91.

While this does not seem very impressive it becomes so when adding pages with a higher pagerank to the calculation. I was not able to find out the pagerank of all of my internal pages. If my site would have 100 PR5 links it would earn more than $450 per month if all links were sold and one link would be displayed on each page. The maximum amount of four links would lead to $1839.

This means the average webmaster will be able to earn more from TNX than from Text Link Ads or other advertisers.The links can be placed as php code which should be suitable for most webmasters and have to be visible and not be placed at the bottom of the site. Placing them below your articles for instance should be fine.

A great feature are the payment methods, paypal, check and wire for instance are supported.

Adding Sites to TNX:

Adding sites to TNX’s network is pretty easy. Add the php code to your website first. WordPress users can add the code for instance to their single.php file which means that every article page will contain the code automatically.

After adding the code you have to add the site to the system itself. Just add url and several other parameters like site language and you are ready to go. It takes between 1-3 days to get a site accepted – or rejected. When the site is accepted you are ready to earn money with TNX.

The main advantage for webmasters is that advertisers only select a category, the amount of sites and the pageranks that they want to buy. Everything else is done automatically by the TNX script. This means that it does not matter if you are John Chow or John Doe, no one will have advantages in this system.

Pages cost a certain amount of points to order which can be exchanged into cash, here is how much each page costs and brings.

Minimum Link Prices:

PR 0: 0001 point ($0,00114)
PR 1: 0050 points ($0.057)
PR 2: 0100 points ($0,114)
PR 3: 0200 points ($0,228)
PR 4: 0500 points ($0,57)
PR 5: 1000 points ($1,14)
PR 6: 2500 points ($2,85)
PR 7: 5000 points ($5,7)

This means that advertisers can buy 20000 PR0 pages for a little bit more than $11.

Minimum Earnings:

TNX’s commission is 12.5% which means that you earn 0,85 points per PR0 link and 875 points for every PR5 link.

Referring other webmasters:

If you refer other webmasters you do earn 13,5% of the points that they earn (lifetime earnings) which can sum up quite nicely over time. You will also receive 5% of all payments made by those referred webmasters.

Read More:

TNX

Pandora adds commercials

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:07:14 +0000

Pandora streams music over the internet which is related to a artist or song that you have entered at the beginning. The service is great to find new artists that make a similar kind of music than artists that you like to listen to. The service was completely free until now.

They have decided to add advertisement to their service. According to Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad about 10% of the users are receiving a nine second advertisement once a day. This looks like testing the waters for me. If few users complain about the ads they might introduce this to all listeners and probably even increase the amount of ads that are displayed each day.

I personally think that it is not such a big problem if you compare it to terrestrial radio stations for instance. It could become one if they would decided to increase the advertisements. One should also consider that websites that offer such services have to generate money somehow to be able to pay the bills for servers, bandwidth and service.

A alternative would be finetune.com which can also be used to get new suggestions.

What is your opinion on the matter ?

Have a blog ? Make it a successful one !

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 20:09:24 +0000

I have been writing about the basics of finding a domain name and creating a blog on that domain name. It can be quite frustrating however if you are full of ideas and write great articles but either no visitors show up or the earnings are not worth mentioning. Not every blog has to be monetized. I know of some that use their blogs purely for reasons such as publicity, discussion or for a reference in their resume.

I assume that you want to have a successful blog with great visitors, great comments that add to your knowledge and some money that you would earn from all of this. It does not really matter if you just created a blog or want to improve of what you already have achieved. The first thing would be to write down your goals. What is the purpose of your blog ? Money ? Fame ? Women / Men ? Fun ?

It was very helpful for me to write down certain goals I had for ghacks such as reaching a certain visitor level, a pagerank or a amount of money that I wanted to earn. Write that down but be realistic. I wrote down goals that I wanted to achieve every quarter. It is for instance not possible to say when the next pagerank update will start which means that it does not make sense to have the goal of a certain pagerank in the next 3 months.

After you have written down achievable goals you should take a look at what is already there. How many visitors do you get per day ? What is your pagerank, your income ? The most important aspect in my opinion is the amount of visitors that pay your blog a visit every day which means one of the first priorities should be to increase the amount of visitors.

To do this you have several options. Use a sitemap plugin to submit the blog to google. Once that is done search technorati and sites like blogtopsites for similar blogs. Add the ones that you find interesting to your feed reader. If you have none try a web service such as netvibes to have a overview of all your subscribed feeds. Read the feeds and if you find something interesting write about it on your blog and add a trackback.

This has some advantages. First your link appears on the other blog (if not considered spam) which could mean a backlink and visitors from that blog. The blog owner might take a look at your blog as well and in the best case add it to his feed reader. You should also become a regular visitor to some of those blogs and comment on articles which leads to the same effect. Just make sure you do not spam the blogs with stupid comments.

You could also email some of the webmasters and ask for a link exchange. Don’t expect a link from a pagerank 6+ website if you have a pagerank of 0. This does not happen, take a look at sites with a lower pagerank at the beginning. Some webmasters will link to you even though you have a low pagerank. Quality of articles is almost as important as visitors or pagerank. Play that card. Every knowledgeable webmaster knows that sites with high quality articles will sooner or later receive a good pagerank.

It is also important that you write regular. You do not have to write three times a day but once a day would be fine. You could increase the output once the ball gets rolling or you see a stagnation of visitors. More articles means most of the time more traffic as well.

Talking about advertising. You surely are using adsense on the blog. If not this should be the first to add to it. If properly added to your blog you should make a decent income from adsense. This is highly hypothetical but a figure of 4-10$ per 1000 pageviews can be achieved with some customization. Everton from connectedinternet compiled a nice list of adsense tips. The best ad unit should be near the main content of the individual page.

Adsense is not the only way to make money with your blog. You could try to sell links using services such as text-link-ads which have requirements that your blog has to meet before they accept it. I do not want to get into to much detail at the moment, if you are interested in additional methods let me know and I give you some information.

Last but not least we have the pagerank. I like the pagerank of my website because it makes it so much easier to sell links on my site. You need links from other sites that have a pagerank to increase yours. The best way is to let it grow over time but you could speed it up a little bit by submitting your website to directories for instance. I think the best way is to get mentioned on other blogs.

The best advise that I can give each and everyone would be to keep the ball rolling. It will take time but to see that your blog reaches a goal that you set is a wonderful thing. Better than sex :P