According to TechCrunch MediaWhiz the recent acquirer of Text Link Ads and Auction Ads is seeking a staggering $400 - $450 million from private equity firms. Has the world gone crazy for ad networks? It seems so…
Techcrunch make the salient point that:
“Ad networks are the hot commodity this year, with AOL, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all making big acquisitions. The size of those deals combined is nearly $10 billion.”
The best and most widespread player in this field is Text Link Ads. But what about the competition:
- Text Link Brokers: Similar sort of operation to Text Link Ads although as an inventory partner, it offers confidentially listings in their Premium Text Link Inventory. Their USP is really to provide a personalised, covert service that protects the value of links.
- LinkAdAge: Considered a smaller operator than the first two, focuses on providing a full package of link buying activiities via auction or link exchanges.
- Contextual Links : Launched recently by the V7N network, Contextual Links offers links embedded within content and blog entries.
Posted by Peter Brady on Wed 11th July 2007 at 06:00 AM, Filed in Text Link Ads
If you have a spare moment you might want to play around with Text Link Ads Blog Juice Calculator.
Essentially this little gizmo gives you some indication of your sites overall popularity against a background of other sites in your neighbourhood.
It does this by bringing together Bloglines subscriber numbers, Alexa ranking and inbound links via Technorati.
Patrick Gavin is the top man at Text Link Ads and therefore I thought it might be handy to summarise some of his pearls of wisdom, taken from various historic interviews.
Speaking about acceptance or rejection from the program:
“Yes it is a combination of: traffic (derived from Alexa data), back links (from Yahoo’s site explorer), and the theme of your website. PR is not a factor in our algorithm but link popularity is a factor and can cause new sites that don’t have much to not be accepted right away. We do re check sites that were denied in the past every couple of months and invite sites that meet our requirements back in.”
Speaking about how exactly Text Link Ads market their services?.
“We have over 10,000 affiliates and run an aggressive banner campaign on many top websites. We drive a lot of eye balls to our sites and work hard with our site to educate the visitors on our product to give our publishers the best chance of selling ad spots through our marketplace. We do believe most sites can sell more spots by using TLA than flying solo. We do automate the ad delivery and payment process which takes a lot of work away from the publisher which is the key to our service.”
Read more...
I think the important thing to note from my experience with Text Link Ads is the very simple interface. Once you’ve set up the code in your blog it’s purely a matter of letting the dice roll. There is the added feature of ad approval by email which offers publishers optional control, but as a rule the whole thing is automated.
My own experience tends to indicate that the take up in your link slots (which can be as many as 10) is gradual. However, the momentum does build and advertisers tend to remain loyal.
Revenues are largely a function of site popularity e.g Page Rank, Alexa etc but there appears to be no reason why each link sold can earn somewhere between $15 and $50, which does add up if you manage to sell out of inventory.
You can get a picture of your potential Text Link earning power by paying a visit to the rather handy Text Link Calculator.
