Is Non-Search PPC Dead? CPA Wave of the Future? Hopes for Flat Rate!

I clearly remember in the mid 90’s you could signup for an ad campaign, make $.03/click all day long, and things were never easier. Over time, the payout rates increased at the same pace as venture capital financing, until anyone without funding who had a workable business model could not really compete with the unrealistic/unsustainable rates paid by cash rich advertisers. This worked well for general publishers who were just trying to make a living putting 2 banners on every page of their site; until the venture financing dried up and all the advertisers with negative returns packed up and went home.

Anyone who was left in the industry after the dotcom implosion of 2000 was pretty much wondering around stunned. There was no trust left, every offer seemed suspicious, and it seemed like everything was coming to and end. It basically was. There was a mix of failing companies trying to hang on, and new companies with new ideas trying to turn profits using certain elements of the first internet economy that were successful. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow would be CPA, or pay per lead revenue. If SiteABC can make $14.00/year average from each user on their site, paying SITEXYZ $2.75 per referred user works. If a large publisher with low quality traffic comes on board sending tons of clicks to advertisers it doesn’t scew any profit margins, they just don’t get paid if they don’t produce signup leads. All Hail CPA!

Search PPC (pay per click) still works to generate revenue for the search engine because they often have keyword bidding systems, and can target words to relevant topics across a huge spectrum. One stop shops for large brokers and networks to use to fulfill their advertising campaigns. Sure you can get a peice of this action by joining AdWords, but it’s not really a very indepedent (they take 30%) solution for you. I can only try to guess at what they actually count as a qualified click-thru at this point. Of course without 100,000s of advertisers bidding against each other the most you’d ever make per click auctioning off your own targetted spots independently would probably yield you 1 cent per click, so an ad network like Adwords is generally the last option people have.

I like the Flat Rate ad sales features in Adbrite. For a long time we have listed our banners at flat rate prices in a shopping cart but there was only 4 or 5 sales total during a year. With adbrite, you can set your flat rate price and it’s seen by 1000s of advertisers. As long as your tracking clicks yourself you can do some simple math if you need to see a price per click breakdown of your income.

Adbrite Flat Rate Ad Sales Increasing

Well either it’s a run of good luck, or people are finally starting to use Adbrite. I had set the adbrite flexible text zones on sitesled to auto-price themselves. When the ad zones are sold out, the price listed for an ad on that zone increases. If there are no buyers the price incrementally dececreases. Those whole idea works great as long as there are a lot of advertisers looking at your ad zones. If there aren’t, the price will eventually decrease to $.80/month for the spot.

On Sitesled, the header banner for example, contains 2 text link spots. 2 weeks ago both were sold for $16.00, and the price raised to $32.00. This week someone bought the $32.00 spot with a “Reoccurring” ad. This means they locked themselves into the spot for $32.00/mo until I reject their ad. Unfortunately, one of the $16.00/mo advertisers locked themselves into a reoccurring ad, so now auto pricing will not matter because there will not be any available space until one of these advertisers pulls their ads, or I reject the $16.00 auto-renewal in hopes that another $32.00 buyer will come in before the $16.00 campaign ends.

WidgetBucks.com or WidgetSucks?

When I first came across http://WidgetBucks.com…(visit external link) in mid-2007, I was pretty excited. They were doing new things with advert presentations using interactive flash banners. I could easily integrate their ads as small widgets into the sides of our sites, and it seemed like they would likely produce better than traditional non-interactive ads. They offered a sign up bonus, once you earned 50.00 they would add a $20.00 bonus to your payment. I thought it was worth a shot to test them and let it run up to $50.00 in earnings, where I’d break down the numbers and see how they really compared with the other networks I had been running in the same positions.

After about 2 weeks of running several ad sizes in different positions, total earnings were around $7.00 compared with what would have normally earned 150-200.00. After realizing it would take months to reach $50.00 I ripped those ads down faster than a Palin supporter yanking Obama signs out of yards on Election Eve.

A little over a year later, I am once again reviewing WidgetBucks site and ad layouts. It looks like they have made some major progress. I have read a few places that certain members of their team were replaced because of quality control issues with payouts, etc. It seems like a majority of their original publishers are still avoiding them. I’m going to chew off all my fingernails and then decide if I should give these guys another chance to rip me a new one.

Maybe it was Etology Ripping me off.

I am not sure the exact moment when the thought of joining some new PPC advertising network made me need to puke, but I am pretty sure it was Etology not sending a tiny $80.00 check for a small text link I had running on http://Sitesled.com…(visit external link) earlier this year that actually got me to stop giving away my traffic for free. The problem is 9 out of 10 of these network’s sole existence relies on them never paying a majority of people who send traffic.

It was May 2008, my birthday month, and I had been ripped off more times than a blind cashier by one too many hotshot online adbrokers… and I had just had enough. Stan over at etology told me to send him a record of the traffic we sent him. I replied with the records, but he had added my domains to his spam filter. That day I decided to try a few pay per lead programs after making some phone calls and spending a lot of time over at WebHostingTalk.com.

Now 5 months later, I have decided to build a site to document and discuss my journey as a publisher into the online pay per lead market.