Monetizing your blog with ads from Adgator.
Feb5Written by:
2009/02/05 08:29 AM
Late last year Afrigater, an African blog aggregator, announced its ad network for blogs, Adgator. Now you can put Ads onto your blog and earn money. Adgator says that they will split the earning down the middle 50/50.But can you really make money this way?
Not many South Africans can actually say that they make a living just blogging. Expecially compared to some of the bloggers in the USA. Up till now our only option has been to try to get adds ourselves. Unless your blog is super famous and you're a super marketing being and you're a super sales person, the likelihood of you getting any local advertising for your blog is very slim. So we have reverted to using international ad networks. Like Google Adsense.
The problem with this is that, once again, if your blog is not extremely busy and famous, the likes of Google Adsense is not going to make any money at all.
I tried Google Addsense. So far my blogs in total have served over 800 Google ads earning me a whopping $1.04. mmm I should live comfortably on that for the next few years.
So enter in Adgator. Two things that make Adgator attractive are, one, it serves up local ads, which is important for South African blogs as we do not have much pull internationally, two, they promise to split the earnings 50/50. Well that should make for interesting calculations.
Once again, this ain't going to earn you a full time salary unless your blog is very busy, serving up thousands of adds. The other problem is that Adgator is still very new, It probably does not have many clients on its books. So far I have only seen two different money making adds. One from IBM and another from Times Media. So far my total earnings have been in the region of R35. Not much.
One thing that I am a bit confused with is how the earnings work with Adgator. I tried to work out what an average add impression costs. But its is rather difficult. One day I had a total of 74 impressions, which earned R2,94. Then the next day I had 65 impressions which earned R0.67. So you see the difficulty trying to calculate the average cost.
A few things might be happening here. Either some ads are far more expensive than others, or there are a whole bunch of free ads being served. Now I have seen that Adgator is using this opportunity to serve up its own ads at no extra cost. What a brilliant idea. They get free ad coverage. I suppose that would in the long run benefit us all, as the more clients Adgator gets, the more ads we will serve, the more money we should make.
So I figured that you would need to serve a few thousand ads before you can actually successfully monetize your blog using Adgator. After serving in the region of 700 ads I earned only about R35. So to earn a salary of about R10000 per month I would have to serve in the region of 50,000 ads. mmm No where near that. Oh well I will have to get a real job.
What do you think of Adgator? Is it worth while? Are you using Adgator? What are your earnings like? Care to share your thoughts with us.
Oh and by the way, I am a struggling programmer, so you can always help me out, by being a loyal reader to my blog, and inviting your friends. I figure that currently if everybody would invite 10 of their friends to my blog, I should be earning a proper salary in no time.
Well unlikely. It was worth a try anyway , wasn't it?
blog comments powered by 2 comment(s) so far...
Re: Monetizing your blog with ads from Adgator.
Robert, you've hit the nail on the head - Adgator will be an effective income stream for high volume sites once it has a critical mass of advertisers on board. I estimate that they are running at less than 10% of their potential at the moment.
I see Adgator started showing some Standard Bank Pro 20 cricket ads this week, and together with this I hit a record high income from Adgator yesterday. With the power of the Naspers group behind them, I'm confident that they'll draw in quality advertisers. By South African travel on
2009/02/07 01:29 PM
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Re: Monetizing your blog with ads from Adgator.
Here is hoping that they will get the advertisers needed into their basket. After all we benefit as well. I like the Pro 20 cricket ad. Seeing that I am a huge cricket fan. Works well By Robert Bravery on
2009/02/07 01:38 PM
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