Sponsored Tweets: How NOT to make money

Sometimes you keep on wondering how "intelligent" some members of these Sponsored Tweets companies must be, just to get a few cents for a click on their ads - not thinking about the consequences. In the end they might loose out not only the clicks they received on this particular sponsored offer but most likely be banned if they are repeated offenders of these programs.

Just watch out for this tweet (to clarify: It's about my campaign which i advertised in Sponsored Tweets two days ago!)

With these programs you can earn money on Twitter & your websites/blogs

• MyLikes (weekly payout from 2$ on, earn for each click),
• Sponsored Tweets (set your own price/tweet or earn for each click),
• Ad.ly (pays per tweet),
• Revtwt (earn for each click),
• Twittad (get an ad on your twitter profile background and get paid to show it for up to one month)
• Twivert (get money for each click)
• Paid-to-promote (get money for each valid visitor to your blog)

Another case are - if you select to approve ads before they are tweeted out - that you can already reject tweets which clearly ask for Tweets or which don't have anything to do with the product you want to advertise like these Tweets:

asking for clicks

Wrong or too short product description

No description at all, just the disclosure.

I saw these tweets in some profiles who only tweeted out tweets like this. It seems like the other advertisers just selected auto-approval which might result in a ZERO result for them.

Some even ask in their Sponsored Tweets for Retweets to gain more exposure and clicks for their Sponsored Tweet.

CMF ADS: Infected by a superbug!

One month ago i started again to buy for several dollars campaign ads in CMF Ads Network instead of buying one of their low-cost Network ads (which by the way exploit just the CMF ADS publishers!).

As there are not many campaign ads running anymore in CMF Ads because they missed out that low-cost Network ads will harm their monetary system and as we can see leads to a severe recession with deflationary tendencies in their CMF ADS economy (a blog post about the devastating economical situation in the CMF ADS Network is prepared for Monday. There i will bring some light into their newly announced changes and "improvements").

When Network Ads (NA) got introduced, they've been running equally side by side with Campaign ads (CA).

This meant when you had SINGLE Ad widget and 2 CA, each CA got 50% of the available page views.

From end of January 2010 on around 8 - 12 NA have been running additionally each month which reduced the visibility for CA, especially on single ad widgets.

ONE CA would get now only -> 100% page views/(10-14 Ads) = 7 - 10 % of the available page views.

For a blog with 10.000 page views, your ad views would have been reduced from 5.000 to just 700 - 1.000 ad views. Most likely you paid up to 1 $ for that ad spot! Now the return in ad views would have been just like a low traffic blog on which you could advertise for 0.25 $ or less!

One week after the introduction of their Network Ads CMF ADS announced that the equal sharing will be changed and NA will show up only 30% of the time when they are running. This should mean CA could get 70% of the available page views - theoretically!

In the last weeks i had some extreme examples in which this was and still is completely NOT THE CASE. There have been some high-traffic blogs which get several thousand page views and my Campaign ad should get at least 1.000 page views after 10 days but instead of getting 100 ad views/day, the ad showed up just 35 - 45 times daily (in other cases up to 75% less views).

The behavior of the Campaign ad is just like before their announced change to a 30% reservation for Network ads. It had to share the page views EQUALLY with the Network Ads and didn't get 70% of the available page views!

Taking as example Ben Barden's Blog (CMF Ads Admin). This blog gets roughly 1.400 page views/month.

30% would be around 400 page views reserved for all running Network Ads, so a Campaign Ad should be exposed 1.000 times/month.

In my case i got just 170 ad views within 20 days instead of 500 ad views (excluding the surge in the first 5 days)!

In an email conversation in which i told Ben about this matter with the two "high-traffic" blogs, he replied me as if there is NO WEIGHTING and that the page views i received are the correct numbers even when Network ads should just get 30% of the available page views.

For a better view of the e-mail click on the screenshot!

Hopefully this superbug in their code could be changed to an algorithm in which Campaign ads are favored with 70% as they give paying advertisers a bigger portion of exposure when you want to buy an ad individually and publishers can earn again more money because they deliver the ad views an advertiser deserves!

I'm sorry for the members which ads got cancelled in the last days and weeks as their CPM was -due to this superbug - much higher than the 10 cents which i'm usually calculating to pay for my ad views.

Finally - The payment proof of LinkShowOff.com

When you look on the upper left corner, you can see the LinkShowOff.com widget. The LinkShowOff.com widget lets other advertiser place a text link with description (visible when you hover over the links) for a set amount (starting from 1 $, on my blog you would pay 2 $). You can show between 5 and 10 text links on their widget. When the widget is completely filled with your set amount of text links, the following advertiser will replace the first advertiser.

In my case it would take between 8 and 12 months (with 5 text links) until your purchased Text link would be replaced. In this time your text link ad would have been shown off between 25.000 and 40.000 times on a TOP location to my visitors! Here you can buy directly a text link ad from LinkShowOff.com on my blog.

Last week LinkShowOff.com paid me for the first time 11,34$ after almost 13 months (click on the payment proof for more details!). In the end it's kind of hassle-free earned money as you have almost no time to invest!

You have full control over the displayed text link ads. You can approve or disapprove every single ad which advertisers place on your widget. If you disapprove an ad, the paid money will be returned to the advertiser.
Payout is usually when you reach 10$ but they deduct 3$ as service fee before you can cash out. So you have to earn at least 13 $ to be able to get paid.