Something’s wrong with Widgetbucks

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.