Normanski

Widgetbucks stopped crediting clicks outside U.S. and Canada.

Thursday, November 15th, 2007 | Net Moolah, Online Marketing | No Comments

In an effort to maintain network quality and high RPC for publishers, Widgetbucks will be implementing some new guidelines and a “gated system”. According to their post their network has suffered from a significant amount click frauds and international traffics that are not converting to sales. Thus starting November 15 they will not charge merchants for clicks coming from outside U.S. and Canada. Publishers will not get earnings from this click and the traffic will be redirected to mpire.com -the online store behind Widgetbucks. Moreover, new publishers will need approval before they are accepted into the program. Widgetbucks has been actively terminating publisher accounts and a I have came across a significant number of negative discussions and comments from angered publishers. A lot has been suspended due to “non-English” contents and click fraud. In light of these new development, I installed a a geo-targeting system based on Maxmind’s GeoLite Country so Widgetbucks Ads will only be served on U.S and Canadian traffic. (thus maximizing returns for each advertising space)

ShoppingAds Suspending Publisher Account?

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 | Net Moolah | 3 Comments

I logged into my shoppingads account earlier and this nice piece of message greeted me.

Important: please note that your account has been suspended. To get your account re activated please email support@shoppingads.com with your email address associated with your account and the website url(s) where you were running our ads. Once we confirm this data is accurate and legitimate we will activate your account and your earnings will return. Sorry for the inconvenience.

For no apparent reason and without notification my account was suspended. Many publishers observed that the ads are not working these past few days. A lot of blank ads were also served to one of my sites so I decided to remove the ad codes. Could this be a system glitch or an effort to cut-off accounts? As far as I’m concerned I adhered to their TOS and never did any fraudulent method. Anyway, I did send them an email as instructed by the suspension notice. Hopefully I can get my account and earnings back.

At this period we know that ShoppingAds is still in its beta phase and by invitation only. But still they have to notify publishers properly before such moves, a simple mail or post on the site would be good enough.

Has anyone experienced  the same?