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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