WidgetBucks.com – Scam Or Legit Company?
Posted on | November 16, 2007 | 2 Comments
With the release of Widgetbucks, a ton of publishers on all the big forums decided to try them out. I waited till some first week reports, then I decided I would give them a try. I set up Widgetbucks on a site that received traffic from all over the world. Here’s some of the countries AWStats reported during the month of October:
United States | Other | Saudi Arabia | Germany | United Arab Emirates | European Union
Now, I know Widgetbucks had something in their TOS against sites in other languages, so I decided that I would e-mail them since I knew I was getting a lot of international traffic. If a company doesn’t want a site in different languages, that means they don’t want that traffic. I got an OK from Widgetbucks to go ahead and test in an e-mail from them (I can’t find that e-mail right now. I’m sure I didn’t delete it… Weird). I tested Widgetbucks for a week, and earnings were actually not that bad. My CTR dropped a little due to less content-dependent ads, but the RPC i was getting was about $0.11cents (AdSense at the time was giving me about 0.02-0.06$). OK, so I decided a month long trial was in session. I only tested WB on ONE site. With fear of being banned or actually losing money, it’s best to TEST first before moving your eggs from one basket to another.
Everything was going dandy and I figured I found a good alternative to AdSense. One night, I was extremely bored and decided to compare my logs (ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA TO KEEP LOGS! Become friends with Excel… TRUST ME) of WB vs AdSense for that one specific site. I looked again at my Widgetbucks stats in my Widgetbucks control panel and was shocked: My adjusted earnings SUCKED. WOW. I thought. This can’t be possible. I kept a log of the updated stats, and re-checked them 2 days later. THE UPDATED STATS WERE ADJUSTED! I didn’t want to jump to any speculations, so I jumped on some webmaster forums and to my surprise, a lot of publishers were experiencing this. I sat and wondered if I should take them off, but decided I would wait till the end of November.
On November 13, 2007, I decided I would take WB off. I checked my October earnings, and they went from ~$26 to $4.36 (Earnings (10/23/2007 – 10/31/2007) and Remember: This is with one gadget, and I didn’t replace my best performing AdSense ad with WB. Instead I changed my poorest performing AdSense ad with WB–> so this was REALLY good to make $26 extra in a week). This absolutely sucked. The AdSense ad was making $1-3/day. It’s not that much money to lose, but the whole point of the experiment was to see what kind of Widgetbucks really was. I decided to just not put ads up there in the end. Removed AdSense and Widgetbucks from that specific spot (I still have an AdSense leaderboard on the site).
Along with the updated stats crap, I just couldn’t stand seeing all the banned publishers from Widgetbucks on the forums. But I decided to do a little investigating… since I believe a company would NOT want to ban publishers for no reason. There was a startup company in July known as Bodis.com. Bodis.com was a parking service for unused/undeveloped domains (I am going to create some VERY VERY helpful blog posts about parking domains. I make a huge chunk of my daily revenue from domain parking. Developing is just a hobby… and you can make money with domain parking as well if done correctly!). In October, they had to create super filters and revenue PLUMMETED. Almost 80% decrease from September revenue. With reports from Matt on Namepros about the situation, he said that people were taking advantage of Bodis.com and scamming them. Well… OK. I understood, and just let things be since I also had some good sites developed that were bringing in income, it didn’t really matter to me. But then when I started to think, who were the people that Widgetbucks letting into their program? Probably the same people the Bodis.com was letting into their program. There was no quality check (Bodis.com had some sort of quality check–only to make sure adult domains weren’t added into their program).
But Widgetbucks… NO!!! Anyone could sign up for Widgetbucks. Anyone could sign up and take advantage. If you got your account banned, create a new one! It didn’t matter. Widgetbucks left itself wide open to be taken advantage of. And I guarantee you they were. So this meant that there needed to be a banning spree (Just like Bodis.com had in October when the click-fraud filters were set on EXTREME). So, I assume that bad publishers–along with some innocent–would be banned. Along with a lot of these publishers who were being banned, I know some of them didn’t follow the Terms Of Service.
Please note: The Widgetbucks Terms of Use prohibit the following:
*Placing widgets or referral banners on Non-English Language Sites
*Placing widgets or referral banners on Ad-Only Pages
*Placing widgets or referral banners on sites containing Pornographic Content
*Not providing a valid domain when you create a widget
*Click Fraud
Doing any of the above is grounds for suspension of your account and loss of all earnings, fees, and bonuses.
Widgetbucks doesn’t want their ads on websites in languages that are not in English. I’m 100% sure some of these people that got banned were putting them on sites with only Widgetbuck ads and/or not in English sites. I guess Widgetbucks was asking for it since they just let anyone in. Reason being is because it seems like the WidgetAds promote purchases of things such as: cameras, cell phones, video games systems, etc. If they get clicks from outside the United Stats/Canada (assuming this is where a majority of their advertisers are–this is also something I think I read on their blog as well), then those clicks will 98% (my own opinion) NOT convert–> NOT purchase those things online… simply because they can’t. They did do some cleaning up, according to alot of threads on the forums. A lot of people were banned (I wasn’t, thankfully… but my adjusted revenue didn’t really impress me) and hopefully things will start improving.
I will not be adding Widgetbucks back onto my site till bugs get ironed out. They are working on some issues, according to their blog, and I just recently found out on the forums that Widgetbucks is now making sure people are verified and such before letting them into the program. I hope it takes off. The PPC market needs some strong competition. I hope Widgetbucks can do it!
Overall conclusion:
Widgetbucks is not a scam. I assume (since history does repeat itself) they were having a quality control problem and had to take action by banning publishers–and some innocent did get affected as well. I’m going to see if I receive my payment, although I fear with my adjusted revenue I will not make the $50.00 minimum requirement. But I will see. If you want to give them a try, check them out here:
*** EDIT ***
November 14, 2007 Widgetbucks Update says they will no longer country clicks coming outside of The United States and Canada.
Any comments or if something wasn’t clear, just post up a comment and I can hopefully clarify. Goodluck!
Comments
2 Responses to “WidgetBucks.com – Scam Or Legit Company?”
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November 21st, 2007 @ 5:56 am
regarding
The Widgetbucks Terms of Use prohibit the following:
*Placing widgets or referral banners on Non-English Language Sites
I know a guy did it while he was using the code in nonEnglish site the total reveneu was thousands but the banned his account
December 9th, 2007 @ 7:18 pm
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