Forum Moderators: skibum
Who's tried them and how well do they compare to adsense in terms of epc and relevancy to content?
[edited by: ownerrim at 8:28 pm (utc) on Feb. 24, 2005]
[edited by: Jenstar at 1:46 am (utc) on Feb. 25, 2005]
"Because we are assuming the risk of collection from the Advertisers, we will hold back an additional five percent (5%) of Net Revenues from your share for bad debt allowance. We shall not be required to remit any Net Revenues to you for any month in which you provide ContextWeb with less than $50 (USD) in Net Revenues or fewer than 50,000 Countable Impressions (as defined below) from the Website; such revenue share shall be forfeited "
I want to know if that's true? I just read the Terms and Conditions, and I didn't see either of those terms in there. Am I reading the wrong Terms? This is not a small issue for me, especially if I have to get way ove 50,000 hits to even qualify.
"We shall not be required to remit any Net Revenues to you for any month in which you provide ContextWeb with less than $50 (USD) in Net Revenues or fewer than 50,000 Countable Impressions (as defined below) from the Website; such revenue share shall be forfeited."
This seems like slippery wording? So what if I bring in $120 in net revenue with 1,000 countable impressions? Does that mean I do or don't get paid?
I'm no lawyer, but if I read this right: I either have to provide 50,000 impressions "OR" provide at least $50 in revenue. If I do EITHER they have to pay me. So that means if I earn them $120 in revenue with just 1000 impressions they DO have to pay me.
This does make me nervous.... Anybody have any experience in interpreting this? Or better yet, has anyone gone through this experience with contextweb?
Thanks again.
Possibly the worst of all is clicksor...they have ok ads but pay about 3 cents a click and use xml feeds that have slowed down the opening of my page by about 80 %...i have received over 100 complaints from people who can´t open the page due to the damn ads.They also render inoperative most browsers "back" button...it´s like trying to serve 100 online users with a 56K modem.
You know something is wrong when users who normally don´t even see the ads let alone click on them, start protesting and telling you how much they hate clicksor...great way to get a reputation.
all of these negative comments come from personal experience in the last month.
conclusion? this industry needs a watchdog and regulating body to get rid of all the cowboys and thieves there are out there(yeah i know,it won´t happen).too many liars and scam artists hiding behind a flashy macromedia web page and false figures and promises with absolutely no clients or publishers.
despite the problems, adsense has got to be the number one choice just for their variety and volume.
i think the most important thing to remember when you look at these sites, no matter how professional they look is that you are probably talking to a one man/kiddie operation working from home, not a multi-national corporation with years of experience.
a lot of them have "outsourced" their customer relations and obviously only pay them on commission earned...this will explain why i keep getting emails from a poor woman in romania demanding that i talk to her to put up her company´s text ads on my webpage and complaining that "it is like talking to a brick wall writing to you"
real professional huh?
Maybe the upcoming Yahoo project will have better results. I'm sure MSN won't be far behind either...
"We shall not be required to remit any Net Revenues to you for any month in which you provide ContextWeb with less than $50 (USD) in Net Revenues"
Anyway, we are doing a trial run on Adbrite. I can see this is going to take a while for a number of reasons.
1. It will take us quite a while to get the ads on our site and get visitors to click these generic network ads. So, our page views will not be a max for about a week.
2. This is the slowest time of the month, second half. The busiest days of the month are the 1-7th, and then Mon-Wed the rest of the month, unless the 15th falls midweek, Tue-Wed. When the 15th falls on a Thur-Fri, we lose alot of that traffic.
Since we are listed in the Adbrite directory by traffic, it is important to be in the top half of page one. That will likely takes us two weeks, when our traffic jumps.
3. It will take a while to get companys to sign on with us, based on 1 and 2 above. We have lowered prices to compensate for that, but our clicks are going to be way down, because the ads are generic and not really targeted. Our targeted ads do much better.
This means we are looking at a minimum test period of 30 days. Any webmaster who tried it for a day or two and quit, really didn't test it accurately. We will see what happens after a month and report back.
We have adsense and google ads on some sites, as well as our advertiser base. We are trying this not so much thinking it will compete with Adsense, but cover us where Adsense doesn't. If it doesn't work, we move through the list while we wait for MSN.
