That was the message I received yesterday in my inbox from Chitika. They previously offer website and bloggers the options of displaying ads that historically include products. So a person might see an ad for a printer somewhere, click the ad and go buy it. The website owner would benefit from this on a cpc basis typically.
That was great if you ran say a gadget blog or a auto blog, but if you wrote a political blog or a finance blog it was pretty useless.
Well these days they are offering up a new and improved advertisement market that caters to websites of all shapes, sizes and topics from travel to finance, sports and more.
So now if you have a topical blog about places or concepts, they might have a performing ad that could make a good fit in your monetization scheme. They still seem to not be a contextual advertising company like Google and Google’s adsense program, so theoretically the two programs should play nice together without violating either set of terms of service.
So if you are running a diet and exercise blog, you might pick up some more revenue from advertisements for Phentermine no prescription as opposed to trying to convert your readers on the latest MP3 player from some techie shopping site. It does seem like an improvement, and as the ad channel fills up more it will probably be a better fit. The trick with these things is to strike while the new ads are hot, but not too soon before the new ad formats are fully tested.
Good luck and hopefully you will benefit from more revenue. I say that not wanting the internet to be spammier, but I do want more people on the internet to be more succesful so they can afford to put more time and attention into generating better and more content.
This week I had an eye opening experience. I met a very successful website owner and internet personality that is not being compensated well for their work or content. I won’t name names or provide URLs for this example as I myself am still trying to understand what has gone wrong with this specific business model.
I can take a look at consumer products, site unseen sometimes and spot the flaw. Such as in a wireless home security product from ademco. Having worked in intelligence, I can tell you that the easy way to defeat the system is by jamming the signal. However, with the internet, things are not always as obvious.
The thing about this broken business is that the site has very very high numbers in terms of visitors and subscribers. The problem is that the owner of the site does not own their revenue stream. They own the site, but they work through a network that sells ads for them along with other site owners. That network then pays the website owner a monthly contract amount for being part of the network.
Fixed pay for adjustable revenue
That may sound like security to web owners that do not want to ride an advertising and revenue roller coaster, but consider what happens when you start off small and your site gets big. When the site blows up with fame, you do not receive the rewards. You are still locked down at the fixed contract rate from the days when you were a small nobody.
So the problem becomes what to do when you are a content producer that is being underpaid?
The obvious answer is to renegotiate or jump ship.
That’s not an easy decision to make under the best circumstances and in this case even tougher. The company managing the ads and the revenue also manage and hold the metrics of the site performance. They essentially are holding the purse strings and the scale measuring the gold dust. To jump ship or renegotiate, or just keep your accountants honest, website owners and content producers have to have access to and control over their metrics.
Anything less than that and you are hamstrung when it comes time to make a decision. In this case the situation is one where the content producer, relies on them for salary, for promotion of their site, for ad sales, and metrics. When things need to be promoted more heavily, support is not there. When earnings are higher, bigger compensation is not there. When ad sales slip, the sales team is not responsible, and in many cases other content producers and their needs dictate and drive when things happen at a network level, leaving the content producer of my case out of the loop.
It goes to show that when you trade security for control, you may benefit in the short term but in the long term its very difficult to get the control back and that in turn makes security a bit of a myth. If a network leverages your site to push other sites, that does not help you. In fact, if the network can not maximize results on your site, they are probably failing to do so on other sites in the network and that is bad for business and will probably be the unraveling of the network ultimately and the end of nice safe checks.
My advice, keep your own controls, keep your metrics, know your risk in reality for what it is and manage it. Don’t hide behind the skirts of a network that doesn’t really protect you at all.
Here’s a quick little video (about 18 seconds or so) that shows a new concept Google has been testing for about a week or so (based on the reports I have read).
I managed to capture a quick video example of how the scroll options work with this new ad arrangement from Google.
I have to admit, that I am skeptical about just how well this format might work with adwords text links or even banners for that matter.
I could see some potential where people see an ad that is close to what they are looking for and want to scroll through other options like they might in a Google search engine search, but let’s be real for a second. Adsense ads are not search engine results so if you read an article about a flat panel tv and see an adsense ad that mentions tv wall mount and you think, ‘hmmm wonder how much that costs?’ would you really consider scrolling through your advertising options before clicking on an ad?
Maybe you would, but I suspect most people would just go straight to Google search and look for relevant results.
