WidgetBucks - Making Your Traffic Pay


Revised 30 Jan 09


I've been keeping a close eye on this new starter for the last month or so to see what the opinion is at Digital Point forums. They're an astute bunch over at Digital Point - all experienced webmasters who have seen traffic monetisation methods come and go over the years. WidgetBucks is getting good reviews over there from a lot of people at the moment - let's have a look and see why:

What is WidgetBucks?:
WidgetBucks is a promising new semi-contextual advertising program. Their attractive widgets advertise products of relevance to the website on which they are placed. Widget advertisements are geotargeted so that visitors see products available in their country. Payment is earned either on a per click or impression basis, depending on where the traffic originates from.

How does WidgetBucks work?:
Publishers sign up to the program, generate some advertising widgets and embed the widget code on their site. Ads are displayed immediately and begin to earn CPM (impression) revenue right away. They also pay on a CPC (per click) basis for clicks generated in the US, Canada or Europe.

What do WidgetBucks ads look like?:
Just like this:


The ad size and colour can be customised to blend in with your site. Remember that the ads are dynamic so they will cycle through a range of different products during each impression.

What does WidgetBucks pay?:
Over at Digital Point people are saying it pays as well as AdSense. That's a very steep claim and I couldn't possibly agree to it - I guess it depends on your traffic and niche. A combination of North American traffic and electronic goods (PDAs, flatscreen TVs) seems to pay particularly well.

WidgetBucks pays in two ways - for clicks from North America and Europe (CPC) and for impressions from most other countries (CPM).

In my experience their North American and European clicks are paying around 20 cents each. CPM earnings are not great at the moment - somewhere in the range of 10 cents per thousand impressions. WidgetBucks hopes to increase this rate once they've gained global advertiser confidence.

Is it AdSense safe?:
The widgets are non-contextual and dynamic - they don't look or work in the same way as AdSense ad units so are perfectly safe to use alongside AdSense.

What about a referral program?:
WidgetBucks publishers receive a very generous 15% of the earnings of their referrals for a 12 month period.

How and when does WidgetBucks pay?:
WidgetBucks pays by either USD check or PayPal. Payment is sent within 45 days of the end of the month in which you reach the $50 minimum payout. As with similar programs if you don't make the $50 minimum payment is rolled over to the next month.

Do they pay?
WidgetBucks issued their first payments at the beginning of December 2007, so have proved they pay promptly. I've received payment (shown below) so they're definitely a legitimate company.


How do I join?
If you've found this short review useful please sign up for WidgetBucks as our referral using the banner below.
Earn $$ with WidgetBucks!

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tom, I subscribed to WidgetBucks.
I am looking forward to reading your review soon.
These guys seem to pay so good that seems to be another scam.
Jonathan.

Tom said...

Thanks for your comment Jonathon. A few people have said they thought it might be a scam, but if you delve a little deeper you see that the company behind WidgetBucks, Mpire, has been around for a few years and is quite well established.

Quite simply Mpire has a reputation to lose if WidgetBucks doesn't work out - which makes me think it's legit.

Anonymous said...

Good Point.
I don't know if you have been using the newsroom in your blogs. They also pay very well per thousand views (4), what's your opinion?.
Jonathan

Tom said...

It appears I spelt your name incorrectly in my first reply - sorry about that.

I haven't been using the newsroom. I'm not even sure what it is to be honest, so if you've got a link please share it with us.

Thanks

Mike Perry said...

Hi Tom,
I have joined WidgetBucks (under your ref)now but haven't got it on my blogs as yet. I'm trying out ShoppingAds first - but it'll only be a trial for about a week.

One thing about WidgetBucks - joining with a hotmail address doesn't work. I tried a while back.

Mike.

Tom said...

Thanks for visiting Mike - always a pleasure. For anyone who hasn't visited Mike you can read all about his continuing quest to make money from free blogs. Check out Mike's Money Making Mission for his latest updates.

Anonymous said...

In the article you mentioned that widgetbucks is a non-contextual advertising program. But this is not completely true (No offense to your useful review).

Widget bucks offers both contextual and non contextual ads, But you have the option to choose whether you want to let widgetbuck's bot crawl your site's content and match the ads or you want to hand pick the ads or keywords.

Tom said...

Thanks for you comment Broken Codes. As you spotted, I omitted to mention WidgetBucks' MerchSense ad targeting can be used to losely target the content of your page. It's not what I would call completely contextual mind you - the limited number advertiser niches supported by WidgetBucks (mainly electricals and electronics) can not match every page content.

Tom said...

Point to note: I have now amended article and replaced the 'non-contextual' description with 'semi-contextual'.

Agilius said...

Interesting site. I was looking for something like this. I have one single question. If I am not from USA or Canada, I will get the payment , right?

Tom said...

Yeah, some eagle-eyed people have spotted that the list of countries on the registration page now only includes US and Canada.

You should get paid, because if you look at their FAQs page they say that any site with some US traffic can participate, regardless of where it is located. I'm in the UK and even that has dropped off their list, but I'm not the least bit worried.

They'll probably fix the registration page shortly. In the meantime I suggest signing up with your address apart from using 'US' as the country. If you select PayPal payment you should have no problems at all.

Tom said...

Registration page fixed and WidgetBucks have confirmed their shortened country list was just a temporary error.

PUBLISHERS WELCOME FROM ALL COUNTRIES!
But new rules mean you will only be paid for US/Canada originating clicks. Please also be sure to read and comply with the rules - people are being banned for not doing so.

OGB said...

WidgetBucks does very well with any electronic related website.

kiran said...

I am sorry to say this but since December 27, WidgetBucks services degraded. Clicks are not reported, I see a major downfall in my earnings. I put the banner so high on my page and I used to earn a modest income till December but Jan has been dead even with thousands of impressions everyday!! Adsense is doing good though.

You might want to revise this article with January's earnings...

Anup said...

Yes kiran i agree with you. There's a noticable drop in the quality of widgetbucks.
My site makes about 300-400 impressions a day. But the stats in widgetbucks are totally different. Also, can anybody explain me how the CPM ads in widgetbucks work? i mean how do we gwt revenue. because i've not earned anything yet. lol.

Anonymous said...

Hi there,

I've been thinking of adding another source of monetization to my blogs and have been in a debate. So far Adsense pays really well and never added anymore. I have looked into Kontera and Widgetbucks before but never did anything.

Has anyone here used Kontera before and what is the comparison people may have had versus Widgetbucks. I would like to add something else to some of my other blogs but debating on which one.

Any feedback and stories would be great.

Sincerely,

Jamie Boyle
Internet Marketer

Anonymous said...

Whatever WidgetBucks may be ,a scam or a right program but i love their ads they look very attractive and make your visitors to stick to your website.So if they will not pay me ,i will have no problem because their ads are so beautiful

DILLU... said...

for kontera .. u get very very less amount for each click .. its doesnt cross 0.1 $ even 10 clicks were done ..