The article “How AdSense Lowers Site Self-Esteem” by Jason Lee Miller couldn’t have hit me at a better time. My AdSense earnings in November were over pretty decent, but on December 1, then suddenly plummeted. I’ve earned in 11 days what I was earning in one day in November. And I can’t find a reason.
A representative of Pheedo contacted me in email after my post the other day. He apologized and took responsibility for Pheedo’s shortcomings - mainly, that the user interface is confusing enough to cause miscommunications and problems like the ones I experienced. He also made a modest gesture which convinced me of his sincerity.
Now, obviously, admitting your company needs improvement does not fix it, but it is the first step, and I thought it deserved to be reported along with the other things I’ve mentioned. I’ll keep an eye on Pheedo in the future and see if they manage to implement changes that would prevent the sort of experience I had.
You may have read back in August that Pheedo let me down. In a nutshell, I had a great merchant trying to run an ad. I approved the ad. Nothing happened. I wrote Pheedo, the merchant wrote Pheedo. There was no response until I posted about it here, at which point someone from Pheedo hastened to comment on my blog, with the explanation he’d been in Japan on business. Funny - I thought Pheedo was a business.
Usually not a good sign when someone only responds after you go public with the issue.
They cost me that merchant. As a result, I took their banners off my sites before I’d made enough to earn a payout. Then they invited me to take part in a survey about what was wrong with Pheedo, which I did. Then they made some changes to the site. It went from entirely perplexing with no instructions to entirely perplexing with some instructions.
And my earnings disappeared. I wrote to them and asked why, and received a barrage of answers from four different people. One of the people actually promised to cut me a check ASAP, which I think I’ll mat, frame and maybe send to the District Attorney in Emryville, California. But one of the others had an explanation for every penny I’d earned. None of it was legitimate, you see! The ad that actually did run on this site for a full month - well, that was just a trial ad, so the merchant could decide whether to really run an ad with me! Even though there’s nothing on the approval page about trial ads, and nothing in the site documentation either, that’s their story. Which, of course, means I’m not entitled to receive payment for an ad that ran for a full month on my site. Silly me, what was I thinking? I’m guessing the definition of a trial ad is one that looks like a real ad, and functions like a real ad, but doesn’t result in the publisher getting paid. Fascinating!
I wrote all four of the people back over a week ago. Guess what? No response whatsoever.
I’ve had no issues with getting payments from both AdBrite and CrispAds. I don’t recommend sites lightly, nor do I advise against them without being as sure as I can be. In this case, I’m quite confident Pheedo has a plan in place to avoid paying anyone for anything.
Think of this as a trial advisory against Pheedo. It looks like I’m recommending against them, and it functions like I’m recommending against them, but it doesn’t result in my getting paid by them.
Couple of random things to note today. One is that Chitika seems to be performing pretty well, so I added it to another site. Part of my income is coming from a referral (thanks, whoever you are!) and part is coming from straight clicks on my site. I know you’re supposed to shove the ads right into the blog entries, and maybe I should try that, but to me as a reader, it’s off-putting and irritating. Am I weird? I would never click something while in the middle of reading an article.
And am I the only person who’s had over 1,000 clicks to MaxBounty campaigns and not a dime of revenue? I know people who make payout pretty much monthly with those guys, but I think it’s all a case of MB having merchants that really fit their sites (which are quite different from any of mine, appealing to a totally different audience). Maybe it’s something I’m doing wrong. Hmm.
I’ve been looking for some cool tools, and apparently I’m suffering once again from my DaVinci-esque “visionary ahead of her time” karma: what I’m looking for doesn’t exist. :theatrical sigh: Of course, where my resemblence to DaVinci ends is: he coulda just built it himself. My main pursuit at the moment is some kind of script that will read all of my domain’s pages and extract the outbound links in clickable form, so I can just go down a list and visit all of them, making sure they’re things I want to link to. This would be SO helpful for directories and whatnot. It’s one thing to run a check to make sure none of your links are dead: but how do you know the page hasn’t been redirected to a porn site since you last checked?
If I find anything, I will definitely let you guys know. I did find one program (not free) that scans all your outbounds and compiles a non-clickable list of them with their pageranks, but as far as I can tell, any automated pagerank script is against Google’s TOS. Besides, I’ve seen some obviously spammy sites have decent pagerank, so I want to be a little more vigilant than that. I’ve also found a few sites that’ll scan each page of your site individually and compile a list of links, but it’s actually quicker to just do it myself, page by page.
Yesterday, I got a check from AdBrite for everything I had earned up to about September 20. The payment minimum is set at whatever you want, even $0, so now that I know firsthand they pay, I can be assured of getting every penny I earn with this company.
Two days ago, I took AdSense off of all of my sites, save one. That one site is working pretty well with AdSense, which is great. But don’t let anyone tell you that every site benefits from having AdSense. Some do: the majority of mine don’t. AdBrite isn’t exactly racking up riches for me, but it looks good, loads quickly, doesn’t present my visitors with offensive offers, and I know I’m going to get every penny I earn with them. Are you sensing a theme here? 
I’ve also gone back to using CrispAds on the sites that fit the rather narrow list of keywords they now offer. (Step off that list, and you get some wicked scary stuff that sounds like ads for hookers and so on - yeesh.) I’m still disappointed that it was working just great on that niche content site I call my B-2 Bomber - on which nothing else really works - and now it’s not. But hey, if it brings in some money that’s nice.
All that said, however, I’m starting to earn enough on affiliate commissions that PPC is losing my interest. I never intended to build my stuff around PPC anyway… I just thought if I had content sites, I might as well see if I could monetize them and maybe cover hosting costs. Recently, my PPC earnings have really dropped off, and I’m not obsessing on improving them. I’m still convinced the real money is with aff sites, so I’m busy working on improving the ones I have and maybe thinking about building new ones.
I’m testing Chitika on another site of mine… one that’s so content-oriented it confuses AdSense and every other ad network/affiliate I’ve thrown at it. I will probably test it on some other sites sooner or later. (Edited to add: it’s now on this one, up there at the top of the sidebar.)
Chitika - and yes, that is a referral link - is an ad network that puts what they call “mini-malls” on your site. They’re cool-looking little ads for products. You can choose the keywords and turn off the search function so it doesn’t conflict with AdSense.
There are some WordPress plugins for it, too, but danged if I could get any of them working in the 15 minutes I spent on it this morning. Some other users reported the same problem I had, and I didn’t see a solution posted. I could work around it, but meh. Just want to try it out and see how it goes for now. Will get fancy later if it takes off.
So currently, the various aff and ad networks I have in play include: SAS, CJ, AdSense, AdBrite, CrispAds and Chitika. I’m still trying to figure out what went wrong with Pheedo - my latest email got four disjointed responses from various people, and a claim that the ad I very definitely ran on this site was not valid and therefore I don’t need to be paid for it. Hmmm.