Something’s wrong with Widgetbucks
By Fili • Oct 15th, 2007 • Category: Making Money
Widgetbucks is the latest trend in making money online. Techcrunch reported, and other bloggers like Problogger, Quickonlinetips, Mashable and John Chow followed.
Bloggers have already complained about the fact that Widgetbucks includes an outoing link to their site with their widget, E.G.
<a href="http://www.widgetbucks.com" target="_blank">WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com</a>
… and that they don’t reveal how much actually goes to the blogger, but that does little to intimidate us bloggers that are always looking for another methods for making money and with a 25US$ signup gift, we had to give it a go.
Generally, the first obvious thing I should maybe share is that Widgetbucks isn’t converting well on any of my content based blogs, running at less than a 0.5%-CTR. Yet, I’m willing to give that time. But, there are some weird things that are not quite there yet. For example, MerchSense offers the strangest things to some of the blogs. I’m not sure how MerchSense works, or if it does works, but the products displayed are no where near the keywords on the site. Another example, not being satisfied with what MerchSense was serving my sites, I went on to change to some category. But, thing is, I noticed after a while that revenue reporting changed as well.
Here’s MerchSense in one of the smaller blogs :
Here’s what I got a while after the category change:
Even with the MerchSense view, some stats are in red a few days following those clicks. While they were quick to implement a real-time display of stats - marking those in red, and changing those when category selection changes, makes me a bit uncomfortable.
Right now, Widgetbucks isn’t looking very good, but, hopefully, this is just some beginners issues which would be resolved soon and maybe CTR will grow with time. If not, then it was just a nice experiment.
Related posts:
- Hot girls : The real way to significantly increase your Widgetbucks earnings
- The problogging experiment - first month earnings report
- Making money through blogging experiment - second month November earnings report
- Making money through blogging experiment - third month December earnings report
- Search money-making booster : The Israeli PredictAds
Hi
Lets hope that these are just minor hiccups as these guys are just in the early stages.I am of the view that things will change with time.I am also following the performance of widgetbucks closely. Two days ago, I was failing to access my widget stats on their site but today, it is back.
Clement Nyirenda’s blog world
It also occasionally crashes IE…
What bothers me is that those ‘real time’ red RPC values become lower when they actually convert (to black). Have you noticed this?
PCHere - yeah, just noticed that one. :S What’s that all about. You’re a relatively very popular blogger, how about trying to get some response from the company?
Yohay - can you track down what version of IE and what’s causing this?
I got it both on IE 6 and IE 7. I don’t know what caused it. Every second page load of a page with WidgetBucks made IE show a critical message and the page immediately turned to the “Cannot load this page” error page.
I notice some errors on their site from time to time but they are really are beginners so I hope these will be fixed in the future. I have written also an article on WidgetBucks with some bad and good points included here.
Hi,
Any one got paid from them?
http://www.myfreegamespot.ccm
[...] is a new flashy CPC widget revenue source, previously discussed in “Something’s wrong with Widgetbucks“. But, Widgetbucks is improving fast and most of the problems have been fixed or in the [...]
My widget in http://www.redmagz.info, isn’t come out. Although impressions is counted. Maybe it’s all about statistics only.