Many people still believe that using Twitter is a waste of time. Perhaps those notions will change now that a company has come along offering to pay you for using their service to shrink URLs. Introducing Adjix. Adjix is a brand new company that is both an ad network and a service which pays people who shrink their URLs through their site. Adjix calls people who shrink their urls, linkers. Adjix places ads at the top of each page where a URL has been shortened without altering the original content. This is yet another opportunity for those of you who would like to advertise to the twitter audience as you can launch ad campaigns through the service.
Account Creation:
Creating an account on Adjix is simple. All you need is an email address and a password. You’ll also need to provide your first and last names. Once that is done, your account is created immediately. Once your account is created, you’ll gain access to edit your profile, the ability to shrink links and also to view your link statistics. As for shortening a URL, the practice is simple.
While shrinking your URL, there is one more option you can configure to go along side the link and that is, selecting the category of advertisements to display. This provides you the option to make the ad more relevant to the link. More on this later. Once you shorten your URL, there are two different ones from which you can share. There is the short url which looks like this: http://adjix.com/s8 and then there is the Ultra Short URL which looks like this: http://ad.vu/s8
Using Your Domain Name With Adjix:
Adjix does provide a way for you use your own domain name in conjunction with the links provided by Ajix. You can either configure your DNS settings to point to partner.adjix.com to allow home grown links or you can fake it by adding anything you want before the adjix.com URL. For example, http://blabla.ad.vu/s8. Considering this aspect of monetization may catch on, many Twitter users who don’t want to see advertising may bypass clicking on links which contain ad.vu or adjix text within them. So, using the complicated DNS route may be the way to go to really increase your success rate. If you are interested in going down this route, be sure to read the DNS instructions that Adjix provides.
All About Monetization:
Earning money for using the service:
Linkers earn $0.10/1000 unique link views (10 cents CPM per unique link impressions) and $0.20 for each valid, unique, click-through. In other words, Linkers receive $0.0001/link impression and $0.20/ad click-through.
How much does it cost to advertise on their network:
Advertisers can place ads for $0.35 per 1000 ad impressions (35 cents CPM for ad impressions) and $0.75 per valid click-through. Additionally, advertisers can review ad reports to detect click-fraud. Advertisers can create their ad campaigns for free and when they’re ready to go live they can just ad funds into their account. At any time they can turn ad campaigns on and off to test what works best.
Account Payouts:
Adjix states that at the end of the month, any Linkers with an account balance greater than $25 are mailed a check approximately 45 days later. This 45 day period gives advertisers an opportunity to review their ad campaigns for click-fraud.
Considering the earning amounts, it would take 25,000 straight unique views to earn $25.00. It would take 12,500 straight unique click-throughs to earn $25.00. Those figures make it seem to me like it would take an awful long time to receive that first paycheck, sort of like the situation with Google AdSense. However, maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones who’s Twitter list will provide a good combination of both unique views and actual click-throughs.
Link Report:
Adjix provides a detailed link report which is initiated with the first shortened URL. The report includes information such as the link creation timestamp, the shortened url, the original url, which type of ad, and total amount of hits. You can also view at a glance what your earnings are.
When going into detail for a specific link, you can view the hit timestamp, IP address of the clicker, hos name, whether it was an impression or a click through and if it was a Valid (payable) hit.
Conclusion:
Overall, this is the first time I’ve heard of a company that has provided an opportunity for users of Twitter to make money simply by shrinking their URL’s. This task has typically been accomplished by using TinyURL, or URL Snippet but if you add on the ability to make a little coin while providing the same shrinking services that Tiny URL has provided, it may be enough to get people to jump on board. I’ve taken a look at how the ads are displayed and they don’t appear to be too intrusive into the browsing experience. The ads remind me of one line Google AdSense ads which rotate. I didn’t notice the ads at first because the Ad Block Plus FireFox extension ended up blocking them from the ad.vu web address.
As for the approach that Ajix takes, I find it to be better suited than having to deal with popups or some annoying flash ads. Will you become rich by using this service? Most likely not. The only people I can see making a decent income using a service like Adjix are the Robert Scoble’s and the Leo Laporte’s but those people are already making a decent amount of income without the need to place Adjix shrunken URL’s in front of their audience.
Performancing Experiment:
Considering this is a new way to monetize through using Twitter, I’d like you to participate in an experiment. I will be using this service until the middle of September and if you’re interested, I’d for you to do the same. Come back to Performancing during this time as I’ll report on my findings after using the service for a few weeks. I’d also like for you to post on your blog your findings and send us a link to your report in the comments.
9 thoughts on “Monetization Through Twitter”
using Twitter is not a waste of time
who thinks like that?
I never though that its true.
Sounds way too expensive. For $.75 per click view you better be selling something very expensive to make a profit. Figuring it takes about 30 to 40 click-throughs to convert. It will cost anyway from about $22 to $30 per customer.
Unless you are selling plasm HDTV or something; you are probably going to lose money on this.
Just had a side thought on this. Using Adjix as opposed to say tinyurl, has the added benefit of not working with affiliate links. That means those folks that drop spammy affiliate links disguised with tinyurls would get no advantage from Adjix.
This benefit could actually make Adjix more trustworthy than tinyurl.
All in all if your goal is to get more people to see your content when you share a link, I think this is fine. If your goal is to go to town with SEO, then it probably won’t work. There are weird times when SEO Goals conflict with what is best for readers.
As I see this, the question here is really one of whether or not you want to play ball with Google or not.
If you just want to share a link with your twitter readership to a site your own or not your own, then this could be fine. However, if you want to do everything according to Google’s highest standards, presumably so that you can pump up page rank and SERPs etc. then this could be problematic.
I don’t see this ad service any spammier than Google Adsense, AdBrite or what have you. (doesn’t appear to conflict with adsense btw)
That said, if you push this link through twitter or elsewhere, you may not get the indexing and link boost from places where you would normally see it.
I do not necessarily see the major impact on readers though. I’ve seen much more intrusive frame systems put in place that have been around for years, and people/readers don’t necessarily seem to mind. I think the key is that if you don’t want people to be stuck on an adjix frame when they get where ever you are offering to send them, then you need to insure that there is a clickable link at the top of your page, that opens in a new tab or window, which seems to break the frame cycle nicely. example that I will temporarily leave up for 1 day – http://adjix.com/5euv goes to softduit.com if you click on Softduit Media at the top it now (temporarily) opens in a new page tab. a little php coding could create a blog button to make that work for any blog web page with the title text “turn off Adjix ads”
If Adjix wanted to go a little more white hat/ reader friendly, they would make it possible for a reader to turn the ads off after they get to the page.
This opt out option would seem to be a nice way to find a middle ground.
Enabling people to turn off the ads, is actually more white hat than adsense itself, which doesn’t enable a reader to turn off their ads at all. This might decrease click through and CPM, but it should keep everyone happy.
Kim makes an interesting observation. The one getting the clickbacks is Adjix. No longer is traffic being redirected to the original site, instead they go to an image on a page at the Adjix site – how do you think that would impact your web site statistics and ability to create your own following?
I have sent off an email to the president of the company and have requested that they respond to the criticisms published on this page in the comments. If they respond, I’ll publish their responses in another post and based off of that, I’ll decide whether to pull the article or not.
Perhaps you should have read a bit more, and looked behind the scenes. What Adjix are doing is not how the other url shortening services operate. The likes of tinyurl create a redirect, so you click on the link and get sent to the actual website. If you look in the address bar you see it changing from the shortened url to the correct full url. So, you end up on the site that you intended to go to, you can bookmark any page and return later.
What Adjix are doing is not creating a redirect to the original page. They are creating a new page on their server. Watch the URL, it never changes. If you view the source, what you will see is a page that contains some basic html and a frameset containing a url the brings in the original site into the Adjix page.
If your user chooses to bookmark a page on the site, they are bookmarking the Adjix page, so if they bookmark anything other than the home page of the site they wanted to visit, what they will get when they click on that bookmark is the Adjix page displaying the home page of the original site. Which will firstly confuse them and then no doubt annoy them as they have to find that great article again they wanted to re-read.
The Adjix faqs state that
. Absolute rubbish – click on an Adjix page and reload it – the ad stays where it is, because it is hard-coded into the page.
Not only are you destroying the usability of the bookmarks, because the page uses old fashioned frames you are making it impossible for those using assistive technologies to get any information from the page, apart from the ad that is.
This is spam, pure and simple. Please stop promoting it as an opportunity to ‘monetize’ Twitter.
I have no intentions on aiding the facilitation of spam. I read into this as one more way to monetize through using a service like Twitter which no one else has offered yet. I can see where you are coming from though.
Sorry, I must have misread the strapline on this blog. I thought it read ‘Helping Bloggers Succeed’ not ‘Helping Bloggers Spam’.
On every level this is wrong, wrong, wrong. The only people who will make any money at this are the scammers and spammers who don’t give a flying rats about losing credibility and readers. The rest will rightly avoid it like the plague.
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