Since I’ve been using it for some time now, I thought a small review of WidgetBucks was in order.
The good
I’m not sure I can disclose the click value, but from what I’ve seen so far, they’re decent. In the technology/electronics/gadgets blog where I use them they can compare with Adsense at medium click value.
They give you $25 to start with, and the payment is done at $50. Nice offer, and I like that they pay through PayPal.
And that’s about it with the good parts.
The bad
You can either choose a specific category of products that you want shown, or you can use the MerchSense option, which should give you ads that match your content. The problem is, they do have a limited number of options, so they can serve matching ads only if you have articles on the categories of products that they serve. For example, an article about speakers got laptop ads. If you have a blog that talks about one of their categories, you have a better chance of getting clicks.
The MerchSense option that matches ads to your content isn’t very fast. While Adsense starts serving relevant ads instantly, WidgetBucks can take up to 24 hours to spider your site, and serves only digital camera ads in the meantime.
It takes 3-4 seconds for me to load and hangs the page for half a second when the widget starts loading. With the attention span that Internet users usually have, 3-4 seconds of waiting for a widget to load is huge. To make matters worse, the widgets don’t load until you’re on top of them. This might help WidgetBucks with the bandwidth consumed (can’t think of any other reason), but it means that if I put 3 widgets on the front page, visitors will scroll down and get over the ads by the time they finish loading.
They put hidden links in your page and their TOS says you’re not allowed to remove them. Yeah, that’s right, check the source code of your pages and you’ll see this nice code of a link that visitors can’t see, served along with the widget:
WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com
WidgetBucks was launched on October 1st if I’m not mistaken, and in just 19 days they got 275,000 backlinks to the front page, according to Yahoo. Somehow I doubt those links come just from bloggers that wrote about them. Sorry, but if they want links from my sites, it’ll cost them a hell of a lot more then what I’m earning with them.
The CTR is absolutely horrible. I’m using a 468×60 WidgetBucks at the beginning of articles, and a 336×280 Adsense at the end of articles on that technology site. Still, despite the above the fold position, WidgetBucks manages to get a CTR 5 times smaller then Adsense. It might improve with a bigger widget size, but I’m not prepared to give a 336×280 space above the fold to a widget that takes 4 seconds to load.
Conclusion
They’re off my sites for now. I might give them another try if they do something about the loading time of the widget, if they get a wider variety of products and they increase somehow the CTR of the ads.
Unless you have a blog about a specific category of products that they offer, I’d say don’t bother.
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