SponsorSelect -They allow site visitors to choose a sponsor for their session. Once a sponsor has been chosen, the sponsor’s ads can be shown throughout the rest of the user’s session (or for the first X impressions) and the sponsor’s ad is launched in a pop-under. The net payment to the publisher is somewhere from $.18-.25 per user selection. This is a very interesting way to monetize a site. I could see it performing very well in the gaming vertical.

CX Digital Media (formerly Incentaclick) - Both their head of ad sales and the affiliate manager that I spoke to seemed to be very publisher focused. They had some good ideas and seemed a bit more engaged than some of the other CPA companies that I met at the conference.

NeverBlueAds - They also were very publisher focused and seemed committed to matching publishers with quality offers.

AffinityDirect - They generate leads for educational offers. I was very impressed with how they were willing to work with us to test new promotion methods and be a flexible partner.

On the banner side, I was intriguied by both Adsdaq and CPXInteractive. Both companies were hungry for our inventory, and were willing to offer some relativley good prices on the spot. Hopefully, our tests will live up to what they were offering at the conference.

Overall. it was a great conference. There was an incredible amount of interesting exhibitors and attendees. If you are interested in hearing more about my experiences working with the companies above and other companies in the space, subscribe to my RSS feed.

You can check out the ads in question here.  The landing page at Sedo is located here.

So why is SiteViper worth using?

• SiteViper aggregates for sale listings from around the web so that you don’t have to spend time wading through forums. Listings are refreshed every 15 minutes, so you will not miss anything.
• You can subscribe via RSS.
• You can search and set up RSS or email alerts for new listings matching your criteria. This feature is invaluable when you are looking for a site or domain that matches a specific niche.
• Listings are grouped into categories so you can view just sites or just domains for sale.

I plan on making a series of improvements to the site over the next few weeks. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

Open Source Web Design Templates - From elementary school on, I have been pretty much a failure at anything that involves an artistic sense. Open source templates are free, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of some of the designs. After muddling through a number of template sites, my favorites are FreeCSSTemplates.org, OpenDesigns.org, OpenWebDesign.org, and OSWD.org. It may take some time to find a good design, but it is well worth it.

Firebug - I usually waste a ton of time screwing around with div’s and other CSS minutiae. For this project, I used the Firebug plugin for Firefox, and it was a great help. Firebug will let you highlight specific elements of your CSS code so that you can see what is really going on with your code. The plugin also lets you dissect javascript and look under the hood at load time of specific elements. If you are very hardcore about load times, you should check out the Yslow enhancement for Firebug.

These tools have been great for me, and hopefully they can help you out too.

Tags: templates, template, css, design, firebug

Some of my doubts about Facebook’s ability to monetize their platform were fueled by recent reports of abysmal performance for bulletin advertising (0.04% click through rate). Facebook users are relatively sophisticated, and they just don’t click on conventional advertisements, or even the Facebook specific bulletins. So how will Facebook generate revenue to justify the lofty valuations being tossed around by the media?

According to the rate card on Valleywag, Facebook offers sponsors heavily branded placement on brand-specific groups (e.g. The Dave Matthews Band Group). They pitch the service as a way for brands to connect with Facebook members and inject some viral potential into their marketing.  The list price for the branded groups is $150,000 for three months. Currently, Facebook has 150 of these groups. If this numbers stays constant, they will be looking at $90 million in annual revenue.

If you add in some premium banner placement, the fixed banner ad deal they are getting from Microsoft, bulletins, and poll revenue, and then we are talking about some very promising numbers. I will be watching closely to see if Facebook can continue to grow their advertising base in proportion to their user growth.

I think Facebook would benefit from delving into the CPA world a little bit more. Myspace must be making a killing with their relatively new ringtones section. They are probably earning at least $10/signup for the ringtone promotion with Jamster. With some creative promotion, Facebook could be the uber super affiliate. For example, Facebook knows when students are graduating, and they know that many students will be moving when they graduate. By presenting targeted offers related to moving to a new location (moving services, insurance, internet service,etc.), Facebook could make a killing. Very few services have as detailed demographic and behavioral data that could be leveraged for innovative monetization.

Facebook ratecard at Valleywag.

Tags: facebook, monetize, ratecard

If you keep the box checked, a text message with a “coupon code” will be sent to your phone, and you will be asked to enter your “coupon code” on the next page. If you enter the code, you will be charged $9.99/month to be a member of Bid4Prizes. Bid4Prizes is a cell phone based auction system owned by the same company that operates the popualr mobilesidewalk ringtone affiliate program.

Photobucket is making at least $7.50 per user who enters a coupon code. They are probably making even more based on the significant volume they are driving to the offer. Considering the relatively young demographic of Photobucket’s users, I am sure that they are generating a ton of signups, and there are probably some surprised parents out there looking at cell phone charges from Bid4Prizes. According to the May Photobucket newseltter, they are registering 85,000 new users per day. If the offer converts at 1% of new users, they are generating over $2.2 million dollars in revenue per year from the offer.

This monetization strategy is very aggressive, and it will be interesting to see how long Photobucket maintains the practice.

The .cm landing pages receive roughly 8 million uniqe visitors per month. In my initial post, I mentioned that whoever was behind the .cm domain redirect was leaving money on the table by not customizing the landing pages based on the domain entered. According to the article, all of the domains point to the same landing page in order to provide some defense against accusations of typo-squatting. By Mr. Ham’s logic, the service is not typo-squatting, but simply a redirection where all domains are treated equally. The article is a great peak into the world of domaining, and I highly recommend checking it out.

In the comments of my last post, someone mentioned Rightway Gate, a company that claims to be able to register .cm domain names.  I gave them a call last week.  They claimed that if you could provide proof of a trademark or other intellectual property, they would work with the Carmeron domain registry to get you the domain. I am not sure if the service is legitimate, but it is something to explore if you are desperate.

The first thing that sparked my interest was how on earth they could maintain such a rapid rate of new user acquisition.  During their signup process, they slyly ask users to import their address book to invite friends to the site. The friend invitations are some of the slickest that I have seen.  You can see some screenshots and a full writeup of the process here. I have read that they send out the invite multiple times. Apparently, this strategy has been very effective for them.

On the monetization side, they have done a good job of developing multiple revenue streams. They make money from:

• Email Marketing Opt-In at Registration (via postmasterdirect)
• Banners
• Search Agreement with Ask Jeeves. The techcrunch article says that most of their revenue is derived from the search agreement.
• Intellitxt. On all of their profile pages, certain keywords are highlighted and if a user hovers over them, they will be presented with ads from intellitext.
• Ringtones. They have some text links to ringtone CPA offers. With the size of their teen audience, they should make a killing on ringtones.
• Sale of Downloadable Games. They offer paid downloads of full versions of games such as bejeweled. Game downloads are probably not a huge revenue stream for them, but I like the diversification.
• They insert “targeted text ads” into the emails and site messages user s send. They are using a Adknowledge to provide the ads. I am curious how well the ads are actually targeted.

With their level of traffic, Tagged has a huge revenue opportunity. To further improve their monetization, I would pursue:

• Developing in the sponsorship/direct promotion area (think myspace). On their employment page, they are hiring some ad executives which should help with this.
• Promoting targeted CPA offers. Ringtones are a good start, but they could expand to education and other targeted offers.
• Market Research. Market researches would pay up ($4-$8/survey) for access to their userbase.

With such explosive growth, Tagged will be a good company to keep an eye on for the next few months.  In my next post, I will cover an aggressive monetizaton tactic of a site with a similar demographic.

Tags: tagged, case, study, cpa, monetize, monetization, advertising

According to conference calls for FM Publishing’s network publishers (boingboing, metafilter, etc), obtained by Valleywag, the magic number if 43%. The FM Publising business guys claim that Google takes a 15% ad serving fee off the top, and then gives the publisher 51% of the remaining 85% of total revenue. To get the full details, you can listen to the call.

Google is making a huge margin from Adsense. I can only hope that Yahoo and Microsoft will gain some momentum with their contextual ad efforts and help push a greater share of revenue to publishers.

My affiliate manager did a great job looking into the situation,  and determining that the offer landing page was messed up. Within a few days, I was credited with the 40 leads. I know that all affiliate networks should work this way, but I am always impressed to have a situation like this handled without any major headaches.