Removed My Site From Post Level Ads Listings As The Rates Are Too Low
I decided yesterday to remove my site from the new Post Level Ads service from Text Link Ads. Although Text Link Ads have been very successful at selling Text Link Ads on my site, I decided that the rates for the new Post Level Ads were too low to make them worthwhile adding.
The rates for Post Level Ads are based solely on Page Rank, rather than a combination of Alexa Rank and Page Rank. John Chow worked out that the following prices are charged for Post Level Ads:
- PageRank 2 - $5.00
- PageRank 3 - $6.00
- PageRank 4 - $8.00
- PageRank 5 - $10.00
- PageRank 6 - $25.00
- PageRank 7 - $50.00
The revenue share for Post Level Ads is 50%, so even if you have a PR7 page that’s doing even only 100 page views a day then that works out to a CPM of around $8. However, it’s likely that a PR7 page would have much more traffic. Even if only 1000 page views were being generated per day, then the CPM would fall to less than one dollar.
This was why I removed my sites from the Post Level Ads scheme, as the pages that advertisers were trying to buy were generating 200-1000 page views per day, but I was only going to get around $0.30-0.60 CPM. I decided there was no way I was going to add any additional advertising to my site that had such a low return. It’s exactly the same reason why I’ve also removed my site from the Vizu Polls ad scheme, as the income they were generating wasn’t worth the amount of ‘noise’ they were adding to my site. I also wasn’t happy with the lack of control over when and how Vizu polls appeared, and my frustrations increased when they even removed the customisation options.
After doing my CPM analysis, I now find Post Level Ads to be a bit of a strange scheme and I can’t see what type of sites it is targeted at, as the rates for sites with both sites with both low and high Page Ranks are too low. It’s hard to even see how the scheme might be attractive to sites with lots of pages, as they would be better off adding a run of site banner than adding Post Level Ads. Having a lot of pages listed on Post Level Ads would also be very hard to manage, as the publisher interface needs a lot of work.
Have you had managed to sell any Post Level Ads on your site. How do the CPMs for your Post Level Ads compare to the other ads you run on your site?
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Comment by Alex on 29 May 2007:
I still wasn’t approved by them but after reading your post I think I will pass and look for other methods to monetize my blog.
Thanks for sharing your opinions about TLA post level
Comment by Everton on 29 May 2007:
I could have potentially asked TLA to increase my rates, but given there are so many pages to manage and the not so user-friendly interface I decided it would be too much effort.
Comment by Ashish Mohta on 29 May 2007:
I see your point there but small bloggers will still go for it. getting money at the start is difcult and guess this is what TLA is targeting at
Comment by Everton on 29 May 2007:
but small bloggers aren’t going to have a lot of pages with page ranks higher than 2-3 paying $2.5-$3 each. So when you factor in that these pages won’t be attractive to advertisers because of the low traffic, even if a small blogger is lucky enough to have 100 pages qualify only a handful will get sold.
Comment by Ashish Mohta on 30 May 2007:
@Everton I can agree with you there. I am guessing unless you have other ad services in your hands like blogads or intellitext, people will still give it a try.
Comment by TerryG on 30 May 2007:
Very nice post Everton. I have been looking for alternatives to Adsense and was considering these Ads. Now I won’t.
You know my thoughts on this being we as bloggers refuse to click ads on other sites we visit when we expect the same from other bloggers and I recently discovered when reducing the amount of poor converting pages with ads on them actually increase the cpc. I have done this, I dumped over three hundred pages and have noticed a marked increase in returns already. This is one way to get around smart pricing and maybe textads had the same problem.