About a month ago The Widgeteers advertising network went live. The deal sounded so good I became a paying member almost on the spot. It works like this: members load ad blocks on their sites. Ads look similar to Google Adwords. When someone visits a page that has an ad block on it, that visit is recorded as a view. In return for showing other people's ads you get to run your own ads on other peoples' sites. In other words, you can get "free" advertising, just by putting a few ad blocks on your websites.
Even though this kind of advertising gets a notoriously bad click thru rate, the paid option seemed like a no-brainer: 5000 views per month for an entire year for something like $150.
Obviously quite a few others thought so too, because the network went down after a couple of days, presumably because of an overworked server. The initial problems were overcome by changing to a different server, and since then I've been keeping my eye on the performance of the ad network.
Unfortunately I can't say I've seen a lot of traffic from the Wiedgeteers ads, but I'm hoping things change for the better next month as problems continue to get worked out and new advertisers jump on board. If nothing else, the free Widgeteers option is worth checking out...
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