Lately my earnings have been fluctuating heavily with infolinks. While with most ad programs you can expect a pretty normal rate of return, infolinks has been fluctuating heavily. I have gotten as high as $6 ecpm, earnings per thousand, and the next day to have it suddenly switch to as low as $2. Why the large fluctuations? Often times this is attributed to variation in keywords I use but, in the case of infolinks it might be the fact that they are a smaller ad company. One company alone might be buying huge ad space from infolinks and decide one day to stop their ad campaigns leading to publishers earning less with infolinks.

My point is, the smaller the ad company, like infolinks, the more flucations you´ll probably find with your earnings. Still infolinks performs much better than kontera. Kontera on average performed far less, at about 2 cents per click.

A recent promotion that was done for SampleADay, one of my other websites was a condom giveaway at a San Diego Festival. Each coondom was attached with a logo for sampleaday costing around 1.6 cents per physical impression. Will this grow my Blog Traffic in a good way? We will find out. Trial and error is one of the easiest ways to find out what works and doesn’t. Don’t worry about failing because once you hit the right method you will reap the rewards.

In Adbrite you’ll see that these full page ads will occasionally pop up in which the user has to click continue to the site in order to view your site.  You’ll see top websites also using this strategy as these ads usually pay a pretty high ecpm.

Basically even without a click every ad that pops up converts no matter what the action that is taken.  If they continue on to your website, you have the option to convert again into another click. So if you are only concerned about profits and keeping organic search engine traffic, Adbrite Full page Ads seems like a decent option to consider.

Confusing Wants With Needs on Black Friday
One of the main goals of ad agencies is to confuse your wants with your needs in oder to buy more than you actually need.  Sure you didn’t need any more clothes, that DVD for $3.99, but the product ad made it hard to resist.  The whole goal behind Black Friday is to get you to spend, mainly for things you don’t need, in attempt to bring their books back in the black meaning, so that they aren’t negative at the end of the year.

This year I am asking myself for this Black Friday what I actually need and will use vs what is cheap and will probably end up in the back of the closet in a few weeks.  No matter how cheap it is, any ‘deal’ is not really beneficial if you never actually use the product, or hardly for that long.

The Actual Costs of Buying Gifts on Black Friday
Sometimes we don’t think about the human labor that went into making your shoe, the world that is easily shielded before your eyes.  It is nice to get things cheap, but at what cost does it come to someone else?  In the land of consumerism, cheaper is seen as better, even at the human cost of labor for slave wages.  People working in factory for less than $1 per hour doing a job you probably wouldn’t do for even $10 per hour.  Yes we all need to eat food at the end of the day, and these people do need money, but imagine if the money was spread out even a little bit more evenly.  Could you imagine cutting back a little, so someone could have a little bit more to eat?

What Do You Really Need This Christmas?
Sure this post probably sounds like I’m preaching, trying to get you to join in on Buy Nothing Day, but honestly I’ll probably pickup one or two things on Black Friday as well.  The main goal I’m trying to get across is, rather than thinking about what you don’t have, Christmas is a great time to be thankful for what you do have.  Even if you can’t donate money, you can always donate time, skills, or even old items of yours this Christmas.  This is always someone less fortunate out there than you out there, who is isn’t thinking about getting that new pc, rather they are thinking about how they are going to pay the bills this month or afford that Thanksgiving meal, among other things.

Conclusion
Be thankful for what you have, and use the season of giving to give, rather than figure out what more you can receive.  Sometimes the best present of all is the look on the face of someone you’ve made happier during the holidays.

First in the ring we have Adbrite the new contender looking to overthrow Google Adsense as number one advertiser.  Adbrite however is missing a few weapons that Google Adsense has, one including relevant advertising.  But, Adbrite does throw out the promise of payment after your first $10, something that you have to reach $100 with Google Adsense to achieve.  Verdict? Adbrite doesn’t defeat the boxing strength of Google Adsense, but any publisher looking to earn money quick, will get paid faster with Adbrite.

Adbrite tag teams Bidvertiser to step into the ring.  Bidvertiser has the strength of more publishers and even an an program that gives you $20 for free to join.  They also pay sooner than adsense, requiring only $10 to get paid to your paypal accout.  Steal it trys to beat Google but it can not, since still Bidvertiser doesn’t offer relative ads like Google and the code loads slower.  We have made decent made with Bidvertiser, but it still just doesn’t compare to Adsense.

And our still champion, Google Adsense! With faster loading scripts, relavent ads, and just plenty of advertisers, Google Adsense is still our number one champion.

We wouldn’t be surprised if Google expands as well into in game ads, with perhaps Google Adsense for games?  Google will reach it’s hand anywhere it can, as well as publishers ready to take it, since it brings more financial support to gaming.  Which 1) May lead to cheaper games, but 2) Might lead to an eyesore.  Just think now, even in your games you won’t be able to escape ads…

This means anyone wishing to place a free ad will no longer be able to for free. However, one section that Craigslist has decided to live open is the Gigs section, which includes ads for short term and low paying jobs remain free.

So at least we still get a free Craigslist section, but for those who liked to put ads on those cities now have to pay.

Walmart is clever and warns Black Friday sites before they even have time to put the ads up, trying to prevent mainly other competitors from finding out their sales pricing strategies for Black Friday.

Keep in mind however, that stores don’t own the pricing data sites display.  Sure they can’t publish the full colored ads, but expect, like every year, black friday deals to be made known far in advance of when they go on sale.

Models are photoshopped, burgers are displayed as absolute perfect, and vacation getaways are well also a dream.  At the same time, we look at these adverts and wonder if we too can achieve this perfection, the one that’s been created for you, but doesn’t exist.

Compare the advertised burger vs the fake one… what happened?  Doesn’t look so tasty does it?  The problem is we keep the image of the left burger in our mind and forget how unbeautiful the actual thing is.

What happens when our wildlife becomes fake too?  Do we need fake fish and cloned dogs?