Where are my page impressions?

Often while reviewing the day's earnings, questions regarding the impressions (or lack of) often come to mind. Usually it's fair to brush it off, the ad company is probably counting it far better than AwStats or whatever tool you use. WidgetBucks takes it a step further, so far as 1/2 of my total impressions will be not be shown, and therefor unpaid for. It's agrivating, and while the WB team has been making improvements, this is a real issue and it really needs to be addressed.

In other news, this is the most recent list of paying CPM countries:

* Australia (AU)
* Austria (AT)
* Belgium (BE)
* Denmark (DK)
* France (FR)
* Germany (DE)
* India (IN)
* Ireland (IE)
* Italy (IT)
* Netherlands (NL)
* New Zealand (NZ)
* Portugal (PT)
* Puerto Rico (PR)
* Singapore (SG)
* South Africa (ZA)
* Spain (ES)
* Switzerland (CH)
* United Arab Emirates (AE)
* United Kingdom (GB)

(information courtesy of widgetbucks.blogspot)

Stay tuned..

WidgetBucks ads loading slow? Look no further

Throughout the web - be it the forums or the blogosphere many have had complaints regarding the slow loading times for the WidgetBucks ads. While they are loading, it can cause the whole site to temporarily freeze, and god forbid explode if you have more than one. A very simple solution to this is using iframes.

In this situation, the iframe can be used to execute the HTML for the WidgetBucks ad while at the same time loading your regular site content without having any additional wait or "browser pausing". To do this, add your code to a HTML document named "widgetbucksad.html" (anything works) & place it in the same directory as where the ad page you're calling it from is. Then go to your desired ad location, put the following code in:

<iframe src="widgetbucksad.html" width="width" height="height" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" >
</iframe>

Be sure to modify the "width" and "height" according to your ad's specs.

Enjoy, and PEACE!

Is international CPM enough?

Okay, so WidgetBucks just announced their global CPM program today (clicky). My thoughts are positive, any change that makes anyone money seems like a good one, the only negative being that it gives a "permanent" feel. International users can make or break someone's traffic, even if it's only 10%, that's 10% less people who will: read your site, link to it, click your ads, check our your affiliate programs, etc.

When it comes to making money, the best traffic is the targeted, interested depending on the niche, most likely to click ads. This traffic is hard to come by, and by subsidizing international clicks for low-grade CPM traffic you leave a good amount of sites with a lopsided scale.

With an end to that little rant, I have some WIDGETSUCKS ANNOUNCEMENTS

• In the near future, we will be launching a WidgetSucks forum, for general discussions and support
  
• I need a haircut

And with that, I bid you adieu!

People getting paid! The tunnel shows light!

Image courtesy of "cobracrck" @ digital point forums


Fantastic news for the earlier publishers, but still very positive for those who registered later. It's a great reassurance to know that you will likely be getting paid for what your hard work has produced - (note the bold). Fear not those who have yet to receive money, WidgetBucks announced today that they will be paying the rest of the October earned publishers within the next week. This will likely lead to an influx in publishers, so hopefully WidgetBucks keeps their current RPC stable, or even better increase it.

One of the real "major" problems I still have with WidgetBucks that could be somewhat easily changed - users get tired of seeing the SAME ADS!! If I went to a site daily, and the exact ad for Labtops appeared every view, i'd of course ignore it and subconsciously mark it as spam. It'd certainly be wise for WidgetBucks to have options to rotate categories, say computers, televisions, labtops, etc. But again, this is a positive post so let's just leave it at that, with a thumbs up to WidgetBucks!

WidgetBucks - taking your traffic with a smile

Last week, WidgetBucks addressed the traffic quality issue on their site, claiming that on&after November 15th, all traffic clicks that are from countries outside of the US and Canada, will not be credited for money and instead redirected to their Mpire website. Instead of having an option in the WB control panel to not show ads to such visitors, and possible run a script to display another ad, you are stuck promoting Mpire's website for free. From what I can tell from their post, WidgetBucks' reasoning behind this is that they claim countries outside of the US/Canada...don't buy things? Sound's ridiculous doesn't it? Well, see for yourself if you don't believe me:

Starting tomorrow (Nov. 15), clicks coming from outside the U.S. and Canada on WidgetBucks widgets will no longer be charged to merchants, and therefore, no publisher credit will be given for those clicks. This will positively impact publisher RPC levels, and the change does not affect earnings from October (just posted) or the first half of November.

WidgetBuck$ blog post


When it comes down to it, I understand that they need to make sure their clicks need to convert to product sales for amazon and such companies, but making such forceful decisions is plain shady in my opinion. Nearly every time I check their blog there's a new rule that docks profit..so I wonder if they really still think they are actual competition for the mighty Adsense.
Shape up, Mpire.

Don't put all of your eggs in one basket.

There are a couple of major rules when it comes to internet advertising, and one of them is never put all of your eggs in one basket. What this means is not to become dependant on just one program, because as you may know, if that basket breaks... you go with it.

Recently i've seen many threads and blog postings claiming that WidgetBucks "scammed" them out of $yyy-y,yyy dollars, which only reassures my point that people are becoming too reliant in such programs. (said links are below, name is taken from the thread title)

WIDGETBUCKS IS F$CKING SCAMMERS! $1400 gone :(

WidgetBucks IS a SCAM - Stole my $320!

Lost $550 and 22 affiliate links!

Even with some programs that have been proven legitimate, with one jealous or angry webmaster, you could be clickbombed and have yourself removed (as well as your earnings) permanently from the website. If you run different programs, possibly through other CPC, CPM, or even affiliates, you ensure that your income won't divide by zero if something happens.

So my suggestion to anyone who currently has a good amount of money in their WidgetBucks account: STOP. Pull the ads from your site, and wait for December 15th to see if WidgetBucks is really going to pay out. If they do, then that's fantastic and I will encourage people to use it, however at the same time maintaining the ideals of this blog post.

Just because it looks good on paper, it means nothing if it isn't in your hand.

Reasonable WidgetBucks suspicions

Afternoon all, today I spent a bit of time researching and looking up WB information, and here's the list of what i've found to be suspicious of the program overall.

• Complete removal of people's earnings. - There have been many recent reports that all of a sudden WidgetBucks users (mostly ones earning a substantial amount of money) will find past days, or individual Widgets at 0 dollars. I am not speaking of the October earnings, which WB$ kindly fixed on the 11th, this is completely different. Hopefully it will be addressed, hopefully it's just another kink the admins need to work out.
  

• Earnings being reduced drastically even after turning black. - WidgetBuck's current system of determining CPC is giving a rough estimate based on the Widget niche first (red) and once they actually check the site it is being used on the price is modified, sometimes for good but most times reducing. This is reasonable though and honestly useful, it's good to see near-realtime results..accurate or not. Those complaining about such rates need to understand that they cannot pay a lot of money per Widget click to people who are promoting s*!^$ like diamonds & jewlery on an arcade website. All of this aside, the problem is that after the earnings are cleared (black), they are still being drastically reduced for some people without any messages or notice from WidgetBucks. So basically if you had 500 clicks at .35 cents and they changed your rate for that day to .10 cents, you'd be losing $125. It's a problem.
  

• Why does the WidgetBucks' blog have a referral link to their site? - On the WB$ blog, found at www.widgetbucks.blogspot.com there is a signup image link on the side. Which normally would be fine if you're promoting your own site, but it sends to a referral link. To me something like this sounds like you're taking money out of your left pocket just to put it back into your right. Doesn't make any sense.
  
  
• Banning users once they reach a high amount. - A couple of the bans with WidgetBucks have been because of a change in their policy forbidding any foreign sites that aren't in English. Reasonable, but the majority of bans have been because of "invalid clicks"...not the former. Invalid clicks is what they're putting out and suspending people for, but is that the real reason? I beg to differ - in my opinion the reason is that the user isn't getting enough turnaround and for WidgetBucks. WB$ basically runs through referrals, or at least their sponsors pay them for it. They pay you for clicks hoping that someone will go ahead and buy that product. I believe that if they notice you are making a lot of money but haven't produced any product sales for them, they'll ban you before you can dig deeper holes in their pocket. Of course this is simply speculation, but certainly plausible IMO.

• Customer support line - Have you ever tried to call the phone support for WidgetBucks? Don't bother. I have many times, and each time I get an automated unprofessional answering machine asking me for an extension, or to FWD it to an operator. Any company i've ever dealt with either has an original automated machine (helps with support, problems, etc) or just automatically sends to a available agent who can help. So each and every time it forwards to the operator, I get a guy's answering machine named "Peter" with some drone recording that has nothing to do with WidgetBucks at all, or Mpire for that matter. By the way, this is the company that claims to be backed with 10,000,000 dollars, and if that is the case you'd think they could get some damn support right? Wrong.

Oh, funny thing - yesterday the WB$ team posted on my blog saying that criticism of their program is unacceptable and that my account will be terminated ASAP. No word on that ban yet, but I await the corruption, my dear friends at Mpire!