As South African bloggers, we all know that Paypal South Africa is not an option, which cuts out a huge number of affiliate systems. That said, monetizing a website in South Africa is far more difficult than doing it overseas.
I have several friends who have been monetizing websites for longer than I can remember and most of them have moved overseas to benefit from the infrastructure and reach available over there. The proof is in the pudding and they’ve showed me the results, which are incredible.
Enter AdGator. AdGator is a CPM (cost per mili (1000)) driven initiative available to all bloggers in South Africa. The way the system works is fairly easy, let’s take a look:
Step one is to sign up for an account, obviously. Once your account is created, you’ll then need to place banners on your website, this is done by copying and pasting some javascript into the source code of your website. The javascript is available once you’re logged into the AdGator system and they offer several different sizes, from 125×125 to various leaderboards and skyscrapers.
What’s important is that AgGator have several verticals they define your site with, be it technology, entertainment, life and so on. As you blog, AdGator collects various information from your blog and assigns you into a vertical based on your content. Should you blog mostly about technology, you’ll be placed in the technology vertical and so on. Why? Well, targetted advertising is when advertisers have a product, such as a new bluetooth mouse. The advertiser would want to advertise on blogs which talk about technology as their visitors are going to be more interested in the mouse than the visitors on a blog about night clubs. Makes sense doesn’t it!
Right, so you’ve been placed in a vertical and your blog has the adverts displayed on it, what now? That’s basically it, AdGator then sends banner adverts to your website and pays you out for every 1000 impressions you receive. Remember, it’s an impression (visit), not a unique hit, so the chances of really making some good money are quite high should you be able to drive traffic to your website. An example of what you could make would be something such as R20 per 1000 impressions, which is known as a R20 CPM model. Note: AdGator give 50% commission, which is incredibly high, most other companies are only offering 10% – 20% if you’re lucky.
Tip: Considering the vertical assignment, it could be a good idea to blog about a number of things and be entered into several verticals as this increases your chances of having a good number of adverts assigned.
I’ve only been using the system for several days and have already noticed a decent income compared to other systems. You’ll notice in the graph below that things seem to be fairly up and down, which I would assume is teething problems as the income is relative to traffic and my traffic has been constant, I’m sure this will be ironed out soon on their side.
I’m impressed and I know a lot of people are, AdGator has hit a unique and is going to be sitting pretty come next year when they sign a large number of advertisers to their portfolio!
I’ve only made R3, but it still rocks my world to see the little counter ticking over.
I guess the best way to look at it is like this: You take 5 minutes to sign up and then let’s say 30 minutes to read over things and figure it out, then 15 minutes to add the code to your website. Let’s call it an hour preparation. Once you reach R200-R400 in your account, that’s a good amount of money for an hours work and from then onwards, what ever you make is pure “profit” and therefore it’s a flawless system in terms of “making money from doing nothing” :)
Once you get the code can you use it on all of your blogs or do you have to submit each blog individually.
Good question Russell. Based on the model around verticals and information collecting to determine which verticals, I would say that each blog would require a seperate account – make sense?
True, they would need to have them listed individually in order to classify them to better suit the advertisers.
In my case I have over 50 blogs (and growing) and hope they don’t have to manually review each and every one of them.
Yup, I’ve had a similar situation before where I had to open multiple accounts and then keeping track of everything, including the revenue earned, is a complete nightmare.
I’ve alerted the team of your question and let’s hope one of them comes along and gives us some insight.
This is really great, I’m so pleased that something new is happening and allowing us more opportunities.
I was also thinking along the same lines as you Russel with many blogs running myself and I’m thinking at a later stage we will probably be able to add more than one blog to our account.
I reckon we need to give the guys at Adgator a little time to get their system perfected. Sure they need to feel their way a little and “iron things out” as you say Chris.
I concur, something new and something local, it’s about time!
There are two things I think will happen:
1. Affiliate referrals
2. Multiple blogs in one account
Absolutely, the system is new and the first advertiser was only added the other day, so it’s definitely a non-beta beta testing phase. Imagine all the impression tracking and banner serving that must be going on their, haha, better them than me!
So a basic question…if you had to choose between Adsense and Adgator which would you go for?
Pros and cons between the two?
Adgator = South African!, easier payments, site impressions
Adsense = established, payment system delayed (right! you get a cheque and wait for the delivery), payment in $$$ (two-edged sword), only paid if they click on an ad.
Advice? I have recently introduced Adsense to my site, so more than happy to change providers if it’s worth it.
Thanks! :)
Damn Adam, that’s a difficult question you’ve hit me with.
Ok, in terms of payment, I have no idea what AdGator are going to do, not sure if they’ll post a cheque or do an EFT, we’ll have to wait and see. I haven’t read about minimum payments or anything yet either. Google posts the cheque, it always arrives and it’s not toooo much of a nightmare to cash once you’re familiar with Form E’s and so forth.
In terms of CPC/CPM models – In both cases a huge amount relies on the traffic you drive, Adsense has another level, not only do you have to drive traffic, but you have to get that traffic to click the Ads, which adds a whole other aspect of difficulty. With AdGator’s CPM model, it’s just about getting traffic, however, at this point in time, there is no way of seeing exactly what advertiser offers what CPM revenue stream, if it’s a R10 CPM model, then I would say that it’s better to go with Adsense and the rand/dollar exchange will make it more favourable. However, AdGator have communicated that they’re going for higher CPM models and if this works out, then I see it being very profitable.
I guess it boils down to your website in the end. There are no Terms and Conditions saying you cannot run both campaigns on your website and therefore you could keep your Adsense going, hoping for clicks, and run a small 125×125 advert from AdGator, that way you get the best of both worlds in terms of revenue, but you can also do a competitor analysis at the end of the month to see which one is driving more revenue.
What do you think?
Thanks Chris.
Hmmmm…good points. So I suppose the safety (for now) option would be to stick with Adsense until there’s more certainty of Adgator? However I like the idea of running a small ad on the site regardless to get the best of both worlds…really like that idea.
Only wish now…if they could give us more formats to choose from!
Do you have any screengrabs where we can see an example of their advertising?
I would definitely suggest running an AdGator banner from the go, I’ve been doing it and the revenue thus far has been decent. It’s incredibly hard for me to tell you which option to go for as I’ve not performed an analysis on your website and its traffic, etc.
Look on the left side of my website, there’s a skyscrapper advert running, you’ll either see an AdGator advert or The Times Mobile advert..
I’m already going to go for it later this afternoon :)
Again, no harm in leaving it there on the go.
Ah. That’s why I never saw your ads…bless Adblock. Checked it out with IE so have an idea.
AdBlock, haha.
How’s this for a thought – Advertisers pay a lot of money for adverts in order to have their adverts displaying, surely the fact that they invest a huge amount of money means that their content is useful and does in fact convert? That said, have you ever done a search on Google and not been able to find useful information? I’m sure you have, next time click a paid advert on the right or top of Google, you’ll probably find what you’re looking for – Afterall, it doesn’t cost you to click the advert!
People are so scared of adverts, it just doesn’t make sense to me!
Good luck with AdGator :)
Hi Guys – WOW what a post and what a thread of comments. It’s going to be impossible for me to answer each on individually but let me explain a little more about the finer details of Adgator.
1. Multiple Sites
At the moment we can’t link multiple sites to one account. This will be a feature in the future releases of Adgator but for now you’ll have to register each site as a new account. I promise this will be a feature but we have certain restrictions right now preventing us from doing this.
2. CPM Model
Our rate card is going to be R200 CPM but depending on quantity this amount might fluctuate. It all depends on the advertiser and quantity booked. We do not plan going below R125 CPM. This means that after the revenue share – at a worst case scenario you’d make R0.06 per ad impression. Bear in mind though that we are refining the model and this might change – but for now that’s how we’re doing things. I also think, that if we get a good enough offer from someone to buy ALL the Adgator inventory then we might make compromise so that everyone earns money rather than no money. I’m not sold on this yet but we’ll notify guys if this happens.
3. Paid Ads vs. Adgator Ads
A lot of questions have been asked as to why The Times’ ads are only displaying once every now and again and not all the time. The answer is really simple. The Times only booked a portion of the network traffic which we have to distribute evenly over a fixed time period. This means we only serve a small portion every hour so that we can serve the ads over a fixed time period rather than all at once. If we served it all at once there wouldn’t be any ads left after Day 1. The key here is for us to sell more ads :)
4. Adsense vs. Adgator
haha, I’ll take a stab. To be honest I think Adgator will kill Adsense in the long run simply because with Adgator you have a better chance of earning money. I am biased here but this is why I started Adgator – to really help bloggers monetise their sites. That said, don’t ditch Adsense just yet. Wait till we’ve filled our inventory and serving paid ads all the time.
5. Personal campaigns
One thing we are planning to implement (very soon) is the ability to create your own campaigns on Adgator. What this means is that you can sell your own advertising for your blog and track performance using our system. The beauty of this is that you can also create an “Adsense” campaign for your blog, put in the Adsense code into Adgator and we’ll then serve your Adsense (or other campaigns you’ve created) instead of our Default Adgator ads. Our paid CPM campaigns on Adgator will have preference over your personal campaigns so when we have someone who wants to spend money on your site we’ll use our campaign instead of your personal campaigns. I think this will allow people to monetise their blogs not only from us but also “lesser paying” campaigns like Adsense when we’re not doing the business.
6. Payment
Unfortunately, like Adsense, we will have a minimum threshold which needs to be met before we send out money. We’re trying to work out what is the best threshold to implement and we’re watching overall earnings of this current campaign to get an idea. It just doesn’t make sense to send out a payment for say R5.25 and it would cost more in administration and fees for it to make sense. Earnings and payment also need to be calculated at month end so we’ll endeavor to send out payments within 30 days. Payments are going to be a work in progress and we’ll have to assess how effectively it’s working and I have no doubt we’ll have a few teething problems. We want you to get your earnings so please don’t think we’re trying to horde your cash!!!
I hope this has helped clarify some of the questions. let me know if you have more.
Justin, that’s awesome, thank you so much for popping in and clearing things up, this will hopefully end up converting several more bloggers into loyal AdGator fans.
“To be honest I think Adgator will kill Adsense in the long run simply because with Adgator you have a better chance of earning money.”
I agree with that! For me, I’m going to run things with AdGator for a month, have a look at the impressions vs payouts and see what CPM I am actually getting and based on that, it’ll be interesting to see what can happen from their.
Multiple accounts will rock and there’s nothing wrong with a payment threshold at all in my opinion :)
Thanks Justin!
This certainly adds more light to the situation and I think it’s a great idea.
Appreciate you answering all (my) questions :)
I just hope there are enough advertisers willing to pay R200 CPM. They would have to have deep pockets to sustain a campaign like that.
Chris broke the bank for a Offerforge R20 CPM advertiser after only a few days of informing us about it!
Are all impressions going to count or only those within SA?
Haha, Russell ;)
All impressions will count from what I’ve been told, but I’m not 100% on that actually, good point!
Russell – this depends on the advertiser. Some will want to target the whole world but I think most SA advertisers will only be interested in local traffic. This isn’t a problem from our side because we do geoip lookups and only serve an ad to local traffic but from an earning perspective it hurts because international campaigns are discounted.
I am currently working with a few people in the US to try and sell our full US inventory to them. As it stands now SA traffic accounts for 40% of all network traffic and US is around 33%. Then we have a whole bunch of smaller countries.
The big problem with the US inventory is that CPM rates in the states are VERY VERY low. In fact, SA has one of the highest CPM rates in the world (i.e. $15-$35) while in the US if you get between $2 and $5 then that’s a good CPM rate.
I’m trying to find guys who’ll pay the best CPM rate for US traffic and if we can monetise 73% of the network then I’d be happy. Everyone would earn a decent amount on this conversion.
Ah, there we go! It’s a pity it’s going to target local visitors only for most of the local campaigns, but it makes perfect sense. There goes making money of Digg and Stumble effects ;)
We have some multi-nationals on the cards Chris so it’s not all doom and gloom yet! Plus, if we can sell the US traffic then you’re really going to be in the money!
I know you gents have taken this all into account and will give us the best, don’t you worry!
Good to hear, I like being really in the money ;)
This is really exciting for South African bloggers . I hope they are successful.
I couldn’t agree more!
Nice post Chris! Iv got a question and im sure you’re the guy to help me out! Ok so Adgator only works of SA traffic correct? So if that true, are your impressions based on SA traffic or total site traffic?
Regards.
Blair.H
South African impressions, but where are you talking about ?
I think the whole process is going very well. Just entered my bank details into my adgator account, now I’m waiting to reach my first threshold :)
Hey Chris, your probably already on your first payout lol
I’m still waiting for feedback from AdGator. I submitted my request early last week and was told on the website that my application will be reviewed. I have heard nothing yet.
Maybe they are waiting until they find paying advertisers first? So far the only adverts I see is for AdGator itself.
Ditto.
@Johan – I must update my account as well in fact, I can’t wait to receive my first cheque :)
@Craig – What question did you ask? Perhaps I can assist you in finding the answer you require?
@Adam – Also asked a question?
I applied for Adgator and still waiting for feedback.
Oh, so you’ve applied, but are still waiting to be accepted?
Okay…just got word from them so all sorted!
I’m glad to hear that Adam :)
At least Adam finally got a reply.
I’m still waiting to hear from AdGator. It’s been over a week since I have applied.
They said they would review my application and get back to me and they haven’t. If they have decided not to approve me then I wish they would at least say so.
I’ll try applying again every day for the next week or so. Maybe one of those will find its way into the system.
@Craig – AdGator is a very setup and I think it’s going to take them some time to please everyone, so perhaps reapply and see where that gets you. I’ve chatted to them and they’re seriously missioning for all of us, they probably have thousands of applications and support questions to go through!
I hope you hear from them this time mate :)
hmmmm… I see my earning’s have hit a fat zero last 3 days.
You experiencing the same by any chance Chris? Was thinking maybe our earnings take a holiday with the Adgator team…lol
Ye, my Adsense has been booming at $60 a day and my AdGator is low low low :/