WidgetBucks Outperforms Chitika & Adsense

Author: Jim Kukral Category: Making Money Online, Online Advertising, Widgets

Sunday
Oct 21, 2007

I’m not making it up. Darren, and a bunch of his commenters, say it loud and clear. Bold emphasis is mine.

Iâ€™ve been running it in a â€™split testâ€™ with Chitika ads in one position (ie 50% of the time I display a Chitika ad unit and 50% a WidgetBucks unit) and to this point the WidgetBucks ad is earning more on a CPM basis than the Chitika unit (itâ€™s still early days on that test though). The CTR is higher on the WidgetBucks ad but the click value is higher on the Chitika ads.

Iâ€™ve also done split tests with AdSense and found that WidgetBucks out performed them also.

As a result of all this - Iâ€™m earning more with WidgetBucks than I would have with ads in the same positions as with either Chitika and AdSense (and considering that they are my two biggest earners thatâ€™s pretty good).

Wow, that’s amazing to hear and great news for my friends at Mpire. Congrats guys! More about high performance over at my buddy Zac’s super affiliate blog.

Share:

Comments

Online Presence :: Make Money Online

October 22nd, 2007 at 1:37 am

I completely agree.

I’ve been using it since the beginning of this month and its outperforming AdSense by a long long way.

It’s working wonders for one of my websites :-)

But it does suffer from slow load times and that hidden link!!

Jim Kukral

October 22nd, 2007 at 11:53 am

Hidden link?

Dr. J

October 24th, 2007 at 10:08 pm

Re: The hidden link

Check any WidgetBucks code, and you’ll find the following:

WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com

A backlink hidden invisibly inside CSS, presumably designed to bump up the WidgetBucks search engine ranking. And Mpire wants it there; under the TOS/Exhibit A section, it says:

“Back-links placed by Mpire in the HTML code must not be removed.”

For all their trouble, they’ve shot themselves in the foot, and suffered the same fate as Text Link Ads in Google. Type WidgetBucks” into Google, and “widgetbucks.com” doesn’t show up at all except as a paid ad.

What’s more, with all the rampant paranoia about Google reducing PageRank for sites that sell links, I’ve got a feeling that many WidgetBucks publishers will pull their Widgets lest they be tarred with suspicion based on that hidden backlink, and lose PageRank as a result. Google has never liked hidden links:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353

Dr. J

October 24th, 2007 at 10:12 pm

Ack - the code didn’t show up. Let’s try that again, replacing brackets with parentheses, and other modifications to prevent re-formatting:

(div id=”container_XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX” class=”wbtw160×600″)(a href=”h-t-t-p://www,widgetbucks,com” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”)WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com(/a)(/div)

Dr. J

October 24th, 2007 at 10:15 pm

Blew it again - the original WidgetBucks code has no rel=”nofollow” in the actual link - copied that from a website that included it in an attempt to “fix” the problem.

Dr. J

October 24th, 2007 at 10:26 pm

More info on the hidden link:

http://www.filination.com/tech/2007/10/15/somethings-wrong-with-widgetbucks/

http://andybeard.eu/2007/10/monopoly-buxx-with-hidden-links-widgetbucks-review.html

Dr. J

October 25th, 2007 at 9:50 pm

In response to publisher comments, WidgetBucks removed this backlink today. Good for them!

Dean Jutilla

October 25th, 2007 at 11:55 pm

Hey Jim,
I wanted to pass along a bit more detail on the backlink reference in this post. The removal of the back-link was simply based on publisher feedback about not being allowed to modify the HTML to place a “no-follow” for SEO purposes - rather than grant permission to modify the HTML we provide, we simply removed the backlink. That back-link, by the way, was never maliciously placed there (as some had suggested) - if you do not have the Flash Player installed, then we wanted to show a link to WidgetBucks, plain and simple. Congrats on the recent earnings.
talk soon. Dean Jutilla, WidgetBucks

Stephan Miller

October 29th, 2007 at 8:38 am

Widgetbucks performs better than anything similar I have tried. I plan on sticking with it. Plus, having traffic on the lower end on the scale, they even allowed me to sign up.

Tom

February 5th, 2008 at 12:07 am

It’s funny, for me Chitika outperforms AdSense! Over the last year I compiled some statistics of my earnings and I actually earned twice as much with Chitika compared to AdSense. For those of you considering Chitika - try them! You can check out this Chitika review for some more info.