Magpie is an ad network for Twitter. They’ll post tweets to your Twitter account on a predefined ratio of  tweets to ads. You could select to post ads as often as 1 ad after you post 1 Tweet or as spaced out as 1 ad after 200 Tweets. This is all done automatically for you so you don’t have to do anything.

Magpie’s ads come in pay per view, pay per click, pay per sale and pay per lead. You may choose to manually select the ads you wish to post to your Twitter account or let Magpie handle it automatically. Another great feature is to prepend the Magpie ads with a custom text like “ad:”.

2. Twittad

Twittad does not post Tweets to your Twitter account. Instead, it displays a background image to your Twitter account. Twittad calculates the estimated monthly ad cost of your Twitter account and you may edit that amount to whatever amount you think your Twitter is worth. The more targeted followers, the more money your Twitter account is worth to advertisers.

Mine’s worth only $265.71 per month with my 3000 or so followers at the time of this posting. Maybe my Twitter account would be worth $2650 per month with 30000 followers? Hmmm.. Who knows?

3. Twtad

Twtad is very similar to Magpie but it isn’t automatic. You have to click on the ads and post them to your Twitter account(s). The ads seem limited in my account. I hope the number of ads grows because I only see a few ads related to my target audience.

• 300×250 medium rectangle
• 728×90 leaderboard
• 160×600 skyscraper

My personal favourite is the 300×250 medium rectangle. There has been some controversy over placing the medium rectangle below the blog titles. I have been doing it for years and nothing happened.

Here’s Google’s official take on this medium rectangle placement issue:

• Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads
• Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content

I don’t think my ads look like the 2 examples above and I have never received any complaints from Google.

Someone from the Warrior forum reported that his PLR article-based sites was taken off by Google. Some bloggers have added an “advertisement” image or text above the medium rectangle as a fix for this.

• Google: No AdSense Ads Below Blog Title
• Google Adsense Ads Below Post Titles Not Allowed

I shall ask Google directly on what I should do with my medium rectange ads.

It was supposed to be launched on the 1st of February 2008. I have no idea what is happening with the people behind this launch but I think it has too many shady things about it that makes it smell very fishy.

Firstly, the appointment of Charles Heflin as the promoter of this company is a big red flag. He has a terrible history of not paying his affiliates as I have documented this in a previous post about NetAudioAds. Secondly, they have been extremely late to launch this program, which means they probably never planned to be early or they messed up big time. Thirdly, some people have reported that the claims of filling up 100% of their traffic is untrue.

Other people have started to grumbled about NetAudioAds and Voice2Page:

• Report: PayPerPlay Audio Ads PPP/NAA/V2P NetAudioAds Vioce2Page Charles Heflin Larry Page Michael Knox
• Pay Per Play Advertising Starting the Cash Grabs | NetAudioAds | Voice2Page
• NetAudioAds – Larry Host trying to Humiliate My Family

There goes another internet marketing scheme… We have to be careful about the people behind this program because they will definitely try to come up with something similar in the near future.

NetAudioAds (Voice2Page) have hired Charles Heflin to market their business. I know Charles Heflin from his site SEO 20/20. I have his “Masterplan” ebook and I like most parts of it. However, I am very sceptical about anything Mr Heflin promotes because he has not paid some of his affiliates commissions and some of his work was allegedly copied from Caroline Bogart.

I know this because I am a member of his private forum and one of his affiliates by the name of Lawrence has been trying to contact Mr Heflin to get his commissions for promoting his products. No response whatsoever was made to Lawrence despite his various attempts to contact Mr Heflin, including posting a forum topic at the SEO2020 private forums.

Caroline Bogart issued a warning to Mr Heflin for using her work in his own work and passing it off as his own.

I am also put off by the way Mr Heflin treats his own customers in his forums by totally ignoring us. I tried to contact him to get a PDF copy of the Masterplan ebook because I lost my copy when my hard drive crashed. I also received no answer from him regarding my queries. However, if you email Mr Heflin about his latest promotions, he is quick to reply to your questions. Try asking him questions about “Pay Per Play” right now and you will get a prompt answer.

The integrity of Mr Heflin is very shady. I have waited months for this and now it is still in “testing mode”. If you say you’re going to launch something on a certain date, then do so. Don’t launch something and say we are not 100% ready as we are still testing things out. Luckily, Mr Heflin is only responsible for the marketing side of NetAudioAds (Voice2Page). If he’s in charge of the payments, we might not get anything like Lawrence.

Using V2P Communications’ coming audio ads, which will pay blog publishers a 25% commission on ad revenue, a site that gets 2,000 unique visitors a day with an advertiser paying $14 per 1,000 plays would earn $7 a day, or $49 a week.

Let’s break this down into smaller chunks.

Visitors = 2000
eCPM = 25% x $14 = $3.50
Pay Per Play = $3.50 / 1000 = $0.0035
Earnings = (Visitors / 1000) x eCPM OR Pay Per Play x Visitors = $7.00

The eCPM is the net rate Voice2Page pays its publishers after it takes their cut. The eCPM rate is for 1000 impressions or plays. If you divide the eCPM by 1000, you get the net amount of money you should receive per impression or play. Multiply the number of unique visitors by the Pay Per Play rate, you get your estimated earnings. If your visitor stays on your site for longer periods, they might get another play and you earn from it too.

A $3.50 eCPM isn’t a lot of money. Some popunder ads pay this amount. I am still sceptical about Voice2Page. Let’s see how it goes when it is launched on 1 February 2008.

1. How much can I earn every time an audio message is played?

Our pricing is based on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and one ad play at a CPM of $20 is about $0.002.

2. How often do the audio messages get played per visitor?

Each visitor receives and ad when they first hit your domain. If a visitor stays longer that 3 minutes, they are then qualified to hear a second ad and another every three minutes until they leave your base domain, regardless of which of your pages they are on.

3. What payment options do you offer?

You may choose one of four methods: Paypal, direct deposit to either Bank of America or Wells Fargo Bank, or by snail mail check to your address.

4. What is your payout percentage?

The website that publishes the ad is paid 25% of the net received CPM. We pay out 25% to the actual publisher out of the net COLLECTED proceeds for ads. Just so you know the split, 25% for the publisher, approximately 20% for the ad agency and 10% for the referrer chain. We keep 45% of working gross to fund the company, the server farm, etc.

5. How often do you pay your publishers?

Weekly, on Friday, for ads played and paid for through midnight the preceding Saturday.

6. Do you only pay publishers for ads played to visitors from certain countries (like USA, Canada etc) only?

We currently only accept ads in English. If we play an ad, you get paid for it.

7. Do you have an audit period before you pay your publishers?

The audit process and the publisher payment are not interrelated except for the occasional advertiser who waits for audit results before paying their invoice.

8. Do you have any competitors in this “pay per play” industry?

Our process is patent pending and our research shows that we appear to be the only team in the league.

9. Is Voice2Page.com‘s publisher referral model an MLM model?

NO, it is simply a definition of the inevitable question of ‘What do I get for sending a friend to you?”. In an MLM, layers descend infinitely whereas with PPP there are only three levels and there is no further descent where the top guy falls off.

NetAudioAds (Voice2Page) will only start paying advertisers from February 2008 after they test the market a little bit. They pay weekly, based on ads played and advertiser payments. This begins the friday after your first ad is played in February. It would be interesting to see how this “pay per play” model works out. It seems like you will make money from each visitor to your web site regardless if they click or buy anything. It works a little like the “cost per impression” model.

However, I doubt they will pay for every visitor to your web site. Most likely, they will filter the source of your visitor and pay for USA traffic or English speaking countries only. They play 1 audio message every 3 minutes during a visitor’s stay on your web site.

I received an email from NetAudioAds’ CTO, Larry Host saying:

We ask that you embed this code fragment in all your pages as soon as possible as our third party audit begins on December 22, 2007 and the prices we charge advertisers is based on the results from that audit.

I plan to embed the HTML code today or tomorrow on some of my sites to start the process.

NetAudioAds (Voice2Page) Affiliate Program

The good thing about signing up early before they start paying is you get to introduce this to as many people as possible to build your list of sub affiliates.

Here’s how the affiliate program will work:

• 5% of what the advertiser spends on PPP ads played on the website(s) of those you refer.
• 5% of what the advertiser spends on PPP ads played on the website(s) that your direct referrals bring on board.

Looks like an MLM model doesn’t it? I am not sure if it is but it seems promising. The verdict on NetAudioAds (Voice2Page) is still unknown. We shall find out in the coming months if this model is going to work out profitably for our web sites.

AuctionAds is not a contextual advertising network. You have to specify the keywords into the system to get relevant ads displayed on your web site. Google AdSense on the other hand tries to automatically detect your web site’s theme and display relevant ads at their own discretion. AuctionAds allows you to set the keywords, minimum/maximum bid price, negative keywords and a couple of matching options.

According to AuctionAds’ keyword document:

One powerful feature you can use is result refinement using a “,”. Say for example you have a web site with baseball cards. You automatically insert the players name from the page into the ads, but not every player may have auctions with their name listed. You could however specify: “derek jeter rookie card, derek jeter, baseball”. The engine will try to find Derek Jeter rookie cards, and if all else fails will show simply “baseball” ads.

If you simply want to return all of several different keywords, use “;” a semicolon. Specify: “hdtv;xbox 360;video games” to return ads for hdtv OR xbox 360 OR video games.

Please keep in mind that there IS a delay between updating keywords on your code and seeing changes on your site. In the mean time the most popular items on eBay will display.

The Comma Parameter

Let’s say I want to display Barbie dolls and Transformers toys on my web site. I am not a girl so I don’t like Barbie dolls and I want Transformers toys to be displayed as my first priority. I would enter the code “transformers, barbie” into AuctionAds.

What this does is it tells AuctionAds to display as many Transformers toy ads until it cannot find any more before showing any Barbie doll ads. The problem with this approach is if there are loads of Transformers ads on eBay, you may never get a chance to display Barbie doll ads on your site.

I have tested the comma syntax in AuctionAds and the returned ads are correct and they work on my web site too.

The Colon Parameter

This is where I have problems with AuctionAds. I am not the only person in this world complaining about it. Since May 2007, some people have posted in this AuctionAds blog post about this problem.

The colon parameter is supposed to be a “OR” operator code for your keywords. For example if I wanted to display iPods and Creative MP3 players on my site randomly, I would use the code “ipod; creative mp3 player”.

However, this code does not seem to work. I received a lot of garbage results instead of the iPod and Creative MP3 player results I was expecting. I understand that there is a delay in the ads but after leaving my ads for over a day, I am still getting nonsense ads on my site. This is so frustrating.

How To Accidentally Destroy Your Competitive Ad Filter List

You may run the risk of wiping out your entire competitive ad filter list when you REFRESH your browser in the event you see a screen like this:

In the mini screen shot above, I encountered a blank page while I was adding new links to the competitive list. I thought Google was having some problems with their server so I clicked on the refresh button to reload the page. BIG MISTAKE! Do not refresh your browser when you see the screen above. Click on the back button instead! I have alerted Google about this bug but I doubt they can recover my list.

How To Create a Competitive Ad Filter List the Right Way

Google recommends using the c from an Internet Explorer browser. Once you have installed it, you will see a new menu item titled “Google AdSense Preview Tool” when you right click on an empty space on any web site.

This is a sample of the AdSense Preview Tool. What you need to do is check on the ads you don’t want and click on the “Show Selected URLs” link. The default geographic location is set to “Auto”. If you want a more thorough list of ads to block from your web sites, try selecting ALL the countries available to generate loads of unrelated URLs.

Instead of copying and pasting the URLs directly into Google AdSense, I recommend that you create a backup copy of the URLs in a text file in case your list gets wiped out like mine.

I like to use EditPlus to create text files because it has a nice sort feature that helps me sort my URLs according to their alphabetical order and remove duplicates. I usually remove the “http://www.” text from the URLs and include only the domain name in my list. Some web sites have subdomains and you may want to include the subdomain if you plan to allow other ads from it’s domain.

How Google Contradicts Their Own Policies

Google allows you to filter their ads but they do not guarantee that the ads in your filter list will be blocked from your web sites. This Google AdSense FAQ says, “Please note that Google does not commit that all ads for the websites that you add to your competitive ad filter list or ads containing objectionable content will be prevented from display on your site”. This doesn’t make sense to me at all!

My Open Letter To Google AdSense

Please consider these new features in your next Google AdSense update to allow Google and all your wonderful customers to make more money together.

• Integrate Google Webmaster Tools with Google AdSense to verify ownership of our web sites so that we may block ads for a specific channel, web site, URL.
• The competitive ad filter list should be unlimited instead of the current 200 limit.
• The crazy bug that wipes out the competitive ad filter list should be eradicated.
• Google AdSense should allow their webmasters to define tags that related to their web site and tags that do not relate to their web site to improve the relevance of the Google AdSense ads.

If more and more people bug them about these changes, they might relent and implement them soon. So please do your part and tell Google AdSense to listen to their customers and make a change.

The big problem with Google AdSense is they consider ads you wish to block as “competition”. Personally, I do not think of them as competition but annoyances. Once you enter a domain name into the competitive filter list, it will get blocked throughout your account. All of your web sites will not be able to display these ads.

As you can see from my competitive ad filter list, I have disabled some useless “Oasis spa” ads and other holiday related ads. If I create a web site about holiday topics, I will not be able to have these ads on my holiday sites even though they are targeted to my site’s content. Heaven knows why Google can’t create a “site specific ad filter” instead of the current filter system.

There used to a method of disabling advertisers on your sites based on the estimated bids the advertisers are paying. When the Overture Bid Tool was still working, some webmasters used to run a check on their Google AdSense ads’ advertisers on Overture and disable the lower paying advertisers. This would increase the chances of the higher paying ads to get displayed on your sites. Too bad, we can’t do this now…