Review: Text-Link-Ads
Posted by Jon Lee in Reviews, Site stuff, Web Development, tags: money, review, text-link-ads
I’ve heard some good things about Text-Link-Ads (TLA) as another source of revenue for sites and blogs. Instead of a CPC or CPM pay scheme, TLA allows publishers to rent out ad space on their site. Advertisers can purchase a link for a month for a set amount of money. The cost of the link is calculated using several factors including Alexa ranking and Google pagerank – I’m not sure if this is the best way of determining a site’s worth but it does appear to be the easiest without doing intensive hand-reviews.
I submitted one of my sites to try out TLA. My photo-rating site, athousandandone.com, has an Alexa rank of about 58,000 and a pagerank of 5. I would’ve submitted jonlee.ca but I currently do not have any pagerank and a relatively low Alexa ranking. The ad block is displayed on all pages (that’s over 1000 pages). TLA concluded the cost of an ad at $40/month. This isn’t too bad, with up to the maximum of 10 ad spots, I could be making $400 a month on top of Adsense revenue, right? Wrong. TLA takes 50% or half of the sale revenue for themselves to cover their own costs.
After selling my first ad space 2/3 through March, my revenue for this month sits at $6.80. The rest of my $20 will be calculated as part of April’s revenue.
Although I think taking half of the revenue is a bit extreme, I’ll give credit to TLA for giving some of that revenue back. They currently have a promotion for new advertisers to give them $100 for free when they buy $125 worth of ads. $125 for $25, not a bad deal! In the process, TLA will earn $62.50 of that money back and pay out $62.50 to publishers. On top of that, a $25 referral bonus is given to affiliates. Hence for every advertise that takes advantage of this offer, TLA loses out an initial $62.50 per new advertiser.
If you want to take advantage of this offer, you can do so through this link. 
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Yeah I wanted to to the TLA thing,.. but my blog sucks apparently
Same here, but once the google pagerank refresh is complete, we should be good to go
[...] Lee wrote a review about his experiences with Text-Link-Ads, I have applied but haven’t been accepted yet! Apparently a PR3 isn’t good [...]
I tried them for a few months, have since stopped. They sell $40 links on a PR5’s and give me $10 of it. Only got one order also. I have heard many having great success with this thought.
I guess it’s good for us smaller time sites though. For those bigger ones, advertisers would come knocking on their doors on their own accord. I could do with the cut in profit though..
I was wondering about this. Their estimates on how much a site is worth, seems on the high side. It may be true for well targeted site, but it is really hard to say since each site has it’s own style.
That’s good information to know.
So your PR5 got in no problems? I would hope so…
The good thing about something like is the zero effort that you have do do with it. You don’t have to worry about clickfraud or CTR. Just put them up and leave them. Now if you can only sell all your spaces then you’ll be set.
I agree, a little SEO manipulation and you could be charging hundreds of dollars a review. But that doesn’t mean anyone would order one if your content isn’t good!
Wanna buy one?
Touché
I think TLA ads are a great way to monetise a website. The system is so easy to use; list your site, install the code, sit back and wait!
At first, I only had my blog listed as an ad showcase, but have since added another 4 sites that weren’t previously generating much in the way of regular revenue and the result has been very encouraging.
If you’re not having much luck with finding advertisers when there are others listed in the same categories as you then perhaps it’s worth reviewing your listing copy against the others.