Widgetbucks has again updated their program policy in regard to sites with a good mix of international visitors. In an email sent out earlier today to all of their members they stated:
International CPM Ads
Here’s an upcoming feature. In early December, we will start serving CPM ads to the non-U.S./Canada traffic. This will give you revenue, per impression, for your site visitors who come from other countries. This is designed to help publishers who have a blend of traffic from a variety of countries.
Our system will do the geo-location for you, determining where the visitor is coming from. Then we’ll either show the regular pay-per-click widget (to visitors from the U.S. and Canada) or show an ad that pays per impression (to visitors from other countries). You’ll see a new column, called “CPM Revenue” in your earnings reports.
So it appears that they listened to the concerns or more likely complaints of those who have a good portion of their traffic from non US or Canadian visitors and implemented this new CPM ad system.
Now hopefully they’ll do something about their widget slowing the loading of a site. I had, had Widgetbucks on my main blog Tricia’s Musings, but I only had it up for a few days before I removed it. It didn’t severely slow my page loads but I found that it didn’t load until you reached the portion of the page that the widget was located on and if you were trying to scroll past that point you had to wait until it finished loading. I didn’t like that.
On that site I had the widget code in the middle of my sidebar. I have ads near the top of my sidebars that I can’t move due to my TOS agreement with those companies. I do believe that Widgetbucks probably does best when it’s near the top of a sidebar and loads when the page is first visited. At least it wouldn’t impede a visitors ability to scroll a page if it was near the top and already loaded.
I’ve decided to try Widgetbucks on this site and a few of my other sites again to see what happens.
This is my critical blog about WidgetBucks, check it out 🙂
Well its about time WidgetBucks serves the international audience. Do they know how many people around the world would like to join their program. Now I can finally join.
Unfortunately a lot of the CPM ads are a bit naff: “You are the 100,000th visitor” etc. However, since the targetted ads on WidgetBucks seem to generate reasonably high revenue, I scripted something to get one without the other.
Basically, it uses the visitors browser language settings to make an “informed guess†about their location (en-us / en-ca being most likely from US/Canada). It’s not geolocation by any means but it is a simple kludge that mostly works. Using this I’ve restricted the amount of the CPM ads showing considerably and filled that space instead with something visitors might want to see.
Not perfect, but better than nothing.
I’m from brazil, i get good traffic, but widgetbucks pay only some cents per CPM.
i still looking for a good CPM program for international users…