Top Money Making Widgets to Use With Your Blog

July 21st, 2007

If you are going to add a widget to your site, you might as well get paid for doing it. Today, there is an ever increasing variety of widgets that offer revenue sharing. The choices range from simple widgets that your visitors will probably mistake for ad banners, to advanced widgets offering an ever increasing amount of functionality.

There are many excellent options already available from AuctionAds to Chitika eMiniMalls. However, choosing the right one for your site is not an easy task. The following is a comparison of a few popular revenue sharing widgets today. Hopefully, this well help make your decision easier.

Before we get started, we realize that there might be some debate as to what actually makes something a widget. This topic itself may warrant a separate blog post in the future. For now we will try to follow the Wikipedia’s broad definition of a widget. The comparison below includes several widgets that we personally like the most.

AuctionAds

AuctionAds, our first widget in the showdown, allows you to monetize your website by displaying live eBay auctions next to your related content. Headed by the famous “Shoemoney”, AuctionAds currently boasts over 10,000 publishers. AuctionAds pays 100% of the standard eBay commissions on sales (this is the standard full commission from eBay’s affiliate program). This is great, but keep in mind you might be able to negotiate higher commissions dealing directly through eBay, and it is likely AuctionAds has already done this for their network . Additionally, they have a low $10 minimum payout and setup is a breeze. Some negatives worth mentioning are that AuctionAds is not contextual, so you will have to supply your own keywords for ad targeting. Moreover, you will only get paid if a visitor actually wins the auction. So high traffic sites will have other more appealing options described below. For an overview of AuctionAds read Andy Beard’s take on the widget.

Chitika eMiniMalls

Chitika’s eMiniMalls are contextual widgets that show deals on electronics and offer a built-in price comparison feature. Unlike AuctionAds, you just insert the code and Chitika handles the rest (much like Adsense). But the most crucial factor, or shall I say profitable, is that Chitika pays per click. The value of each click depends on the product. Many publishers use this to their advantage by reviewing high priced items and putting a Chitika Mini Mall at the bottom of the review. Chitika has grown quite popular boasting over 12,000 publishers. Many publishers will do well with Chitika since they are natural fit for Gadget blogs and electronics review sites. If you don’t blog about gadgets you might want to consider other widgets for monetizing your site. Darren Rowse of Problogger.net has a review of Chitika MiniMalls which is worth reading before you dive in.

Shopping.com Shop Widgets

Shopping.com’s Shop Widgets are pre-built ad units based on their popular price comparison site product inventory. Configuring Shop Widgets requires you to enter keywords in order to target the ads. The ad layouts are limited and lack certain functionality like product search and category selection. In general, publishers will have difficulty placing these widgets on non shopping related sites and blogs. Shopping.com offers a generous 50% revenue share of every click generated from your site. Case in point; even though AuctionAds is offering 100%, it’s not as compelling because you have to make a sale to get paid. Like Chitika, Shopping.com widget is a great candidate for high traffic sites, where visitors are likely to click more but convert less. I personally prefer Chitika though because of their great functionality and ease of use.

Tumri AdPods

Tumri’s AdPods a well funded newcomer to the widget arena. Like Chitika’s MiniMalls, AdPods have functionality embedded into the AdPods. For example, AdPods enable your visitors to select categories and even search within the AdPod. Tumri’s claims a “self-optimizing engine” which optimizes Adpods with products based on publisher’s preferences. This does not mean Tumri is contextual, as you must still personalize AdPods with keywords related to your site. The Adpods are visually appealing, but be sure to test it on your site and verify that it does not slow your page load time. Tumri offers publishers a mix of commissions on sales and pay per click payouts. I think with contextual targeting, AdPods could offer an exciting look into the future of revenue sharing widgets. Gonnaeatthat.net has more to read about Turmi.

Boo-Box

Boo-box developed in Brazil, is a dazzling little widget that is activated when a user clicks on a Boo-Box link. I remember when Techcrunch first broke the story about Boo-Box, it’s was Boo-Box’s style that really caught my eye. When a visitor clicks on boo-”boxified” link, a flash style window opens with a selection of Amazon products appear related to the selected link.

The presentation is very dramatic and visual. The installation could not be easier, requiring a single line of code. However, that line of code must be inserted every time you create a boo-box link within your content. If you are Wordpress blogger, Boo-Box has developed a plugin to make it easier to implement Boo-box. Earnings with this widget will come down to the content of the site. In other words, you must embed boo-box into various keywords in your content, and if your content does not have an applicable Amazon related product, you might have a tough time using it as often as you like. Finally, you must sign up to be an Amazon affiliate to add boo-box to your site.

TTZ Media Widget

TTZ Media Network Widget is John Chow’s widget which uses Shopping.com’s product catalog to display ads. The TTZ widget offers a nice variety of layouts which are an improvement over Shopping.com’s similar widget.

For example, TTZ has done some of the heavy design lifting to offer some snazzy widget banners with instant price comparisons below. It is unclear what the revenue share is, but John Chow states that he earns $2.00 CPM (which is $2 per thousand page impressions). Just like Shopwidgets, publishers earn money for every click. TTZ media widget offers a more compelling ad layout, but at what cost? It is possible that bloggers might do better dealing directly with the Shopping.com for higher revenues because there will be no middle-man (John Chow) to take his cut of the earnings. Here is a testimonial from Bob Buskirk about his success with the TTZ media widget after hitting the front page of Digg.

Kontera

Not your traditional widget, Kontera turns various keywords on your page into miniature link ads. When a visitor hovers over a Kontera link, a small pop-up appears with relevant advertising to that keyword. Kontera calls this keyword linking technology “in-text relevance”. Unlike other widgets which require some maintenance, Kontera is automatic and contextual, so after initial installation there is no further maintenance required. Kontera publishers are paid for every visitor click on advertising pop-ups. The value of the click is determined by the keyword which was linked by Kontera. So the amount of money you make will be highly dependent on the subject matter of your website. For example, a blog about health insurance will probably have higher priced keywords than a blog about comic books. Kontera also gives you control of color, placement, advertisers, and quantity of links displayed on any page. While Kontera is an excellent choice for many sites, some visitors might get annoyed by the keyword link ads. When I visit a website I assume that all links on the page were added to enhance the value of the content. However, when you run Kontera, some keywords that trigger the pop-up do not add any value. In fact Kontera could end up distracting visitors from the content and watering down the purpose of the page. Finally for publishers running Adsense, Google’s terms prohibit using any other contextual advertising with Google Adsense. Some publishers have been getting away with running both, and some premium Adsense publishers have gotten permission from Google to run both simultaneously. Doshdosh.com has a nice review of Kontera which I found very useful.

IntelliTXT

If you are considering Kontera, you should also take a look at IntelliTXT as well, which offers a very similar service to Kontera. IntelliTXT converts text in your content into links which are advertisements when you mouse over them. Unlike Kontera, the IntelliTXT website offers very little information about how their product works. They do however have an interesting case study in which they discuss how Eidos promoted their video game Tomb Raider Legend by utilizing in-text placement advertising. The result is impressive, when you hover over the words “game preview” an ad appears with a video preview of the Tomb Raider Legend. I would think this an extremely effective method of advertising for Edios and possibly lucrative form of promotion for the webmaster. Finally, I found an interesting earnings comparison between IntelliTXT and Kontera. The author of the comparison claims to have earned more per month using IntelliTXT than he did with Kontera. Also interesting is that the article states that IntelliTXT only accepts sites with a minimum of 500k impressions per month. I could not verify this on the IntelliTXT website, but this restriction could hold back most small sites from application approval.

Cooqy Widget

Cooqy (great web 2.0 name) is a service which offers publishers a simple way to promote their own eBay auctions. Cooqy offer a custom title, and a nice visual showcase of your auction.

This is a great option for eBay Powersellers who happen to have blogs or websites. However, if you don’t sell on eBay, this widget is probably not of much interest to you. As much as I like the visual appeal of this widget, I’m putting it at the bottom of my list (literally) because it’s probably not a viable option for most publishers. Finally it must be noted, that eBay is now offering some great widget options to promote auctions. Not sure how much longer Cooqy can continue with this type of competition. Webby’s World has a detailed breakdown of the features in Cooqy.

Widget Comparison at a glance

A few words about placement

It’s important to note that placement is critical for revenues and click through on any widget. That being said, some of the widgets that cannot be placed within content will receive fewer clicks. If your site is mostly content based, then you might want to consider a widget that is layout friendly enough to fit between the fold (in the middle or inside of the content).

Conclusion

With so many choices out there, it might be hard to find the right widget for your site on the first try. My suggestion would be to sample a few of the widgets we have covered and see which works best with your site. You should experiment with placements, Pay per Click vs Commission Based, and contextual vs tagged. Different sites will have varying results. Finally, don’t try to fit a round peg through a square hole, if the widget has nothing to do with your site, and you think your readers will have little interest in it, do not place it on your site at all. The key is to enhance the users visit, not distract.

Have fun, and start making money!

Entry Filed under: General