Any active x users here?

Do you really get so much money?

[Fryman]

I tried everything I could find to get some income from the 1,600 unique visitors I get each day. They are eating up my bandwith and I am tired of paying hosting fees and getting nothing in return.

I tried adsence, the ads only pay a few cents per clik, and I only get like a few clicks each day. I tried some affiliate program (a t-shirt company). After 2,000 clicks I sold only one lousy tshirt and got a comission of 4 bucks. I tried popups, and even though I was getting 1,600 visits, the popup stats only showed a few hundred, so I was earning about 50 cents each day (when they say they will pay you an average of $7 for each 1,000 uniques)

So, I now put up an active x popup that asks you to install some kind of program on your pc. I hate this, I really hate it, never wanted to use it, but it seems to be the last resource left to get some income from a free site.

They say they pay 20 cents per install, since I get 50,000 uniques per month, even with a tiny success rate of 5% installs it seems I would be earning an average of 500 bucks each month.
Seems too good to be true, has anyone here ever used these active x things?

I would really apreciate your comments about it.

Thanks!

[ronin]

It depends on your topic, but I imagine with 1600 uniques a day you could be making a lot more than $500 a month with AdSense and affiliate links and these would be less intrusive than popups or downloads.

AdSense tends to work well with editorial sites which have tightly focused articles on specific topics.

Affiliate links work well as recommendations or endorsements beside an article.

[nativenewyorker]

Sounds like parasiteware. It is only going to take money out of your pocket (and everyone else's) over the long term.

[shri]

>> I am tired of paying hosting fees and getting nothing in return.

Thought of selling your site and getting out of the business? Depending on your PR, age of site and links you can get more than what you'd make in a year at your current rate.

With a forced activeX download, you can expect to loose return traffic you might have hoped to get.

[chrisnrae]

If visitors realize your trying to install spyware on them, you're likely to lose some of your current traffic. You said you tried a T-shirt program - but was it targeted? Same with Adsense, did you play around with the placement to see if it changed the earnings per click or the click thru rate?

[eljefe3]

I'd stay away from the active x thing.

[skibum]

Go through the aff networks and find a few programs geared toward your visitors. There's bound to be something. If you've got PR you could just make some dedicated pages for aff programs, publish a few merchant writeups & probably generate a few bucks.

[HeyJim]

I now put up an active x popup that asks you to install some kind of program on your pc

I have a voodoo doll home that now has your name on it.

Think harder for your solution.

[Fryman]

Thanks for your replies. This site is an icon site, visited by young people that don't have money in their pockets to buy stuff, so affiliate marketing is useless.

There aren't many adsence ads related to my site, and several times I ended up with those public service ones. Even when I did get an ad, they only pay a few cents per click.

I put up the active x and I am now getting $15 per day. My site has top rankings on Google, and one thing I noticed is that it has always got loads of new visitors, and a tiny amount of returning ones. Since people are visitng the site and not coming back, I think the active x won't affect me at all.

I don't want to get into ethical or moral discussions. Yes, I know this sucks, and I didn't want to use it, but if people are just using my site to get what they want, using my bandwith, and not even clicking on one lousy ad, the only way for me to get some income was this, and I am very happy with the results.

[ronin]

This site is an icon site, visited by young people that don't have money in their pockets to buy stuff

That might explain why you're finding it hard to make any money. Your best bet is to stick with CPC and CPM advertising and accept that the site will only ever make pocket money. Keep the site ticking over and use your skills and knowledge to build a site which targets a demographic sector which has money to spend.

Since people are visitng the site and not coming back, I think the active x won't affect me at all.

The two may not be unrelated.

I don't want to get into ethical or moral discussions.

You can't start talking about popups with downloads and not get into one.

[Fryman]

Yeah, I agree with you... this was a site I built to test my SEO skills, and I must say I am impressed with the results, since it is one of the top-ranked sites on Google for the keywords I was targeting.

So, now that my site got to be so big, it started costing more to keep. As I said, young people don't have credit cards and don't go around buying things on the net.

Someone here suggested I should sell the site. Well, I am now selling a free online games site, and every single email I get asks the same thing: "how much is the site earning each month?".
When you sell a site, 99% of the potential buyers couldn't care less about how good your PR is, or how many thousand uniques it gets each month, all they want to know is how much money it makes. So, if I sell my site, with PR5, 50k uniques per month, AND I add some nice income from popups, I will sure get a much higher offer than if I sell it without any source of income.