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For my keywords, prices were cheap in comparison to OT, so I'd like to give it a try, but the bad experiences everyone has had make me want to tread lightly.
Anyone had any positive experiences lately?
It's really funny in one of our terms where there are 5 advertisers who used to bid up to 8¢. With all the questionable clicks we all tried to stay out of the #1 position by bidding just under. What's now happened is that we are all at 5¢ and have nowhere to go. The guy in number 1 in now stuck.
We are also there "just in case" and it is not a factor in our budget of $300 - $400 per month we spend on AdWords, Overture & FindWhat.
It's also REALLY annoying to receive low balance e-mails EVERY DAY as soon as we fall below $10. As our daily spend is only 25¢ we get these e-mails EVERY DAY for over a month. We finally had to block them at the mail server just to keep our blood pressure under control.
However, I'm noticing that About.com's pages are getting top rankings in Google (and consequently Yahoo and AOL)for a lot of relevant search terms.
Overall, I'd say that About.com's pages have slipped in the Google rankings, probably because there aren't as many "guidesites" as there used to be and others aren't publishing as much content as they did before guide compensation was cut drastically. Certainly About.com's traffic is down from where it was a year ago. Still, if an About.com guidesite on *your* topic is doing well, overall trends may not be important.
I'm not very familiar with the Sprinks program these days, but I do know that many--and perhaps most--Sprinks listings are served outside of About.com "guidesite" pages. Let's say you buy a Sprink for your Blue Widgets on the Widgets.about.com site. A lot of those Sprinks could turn up in search or on third-party affiliate sites, which is good if those non-guidesite pages deliver quality leads but not go good if (for example) your Sprinks are being clicked on by an affiliate halfway around the world who's trying to boost his earnings.
