Revenue-sharing adsense ads on community websites
A review of 3 months of posting on Hedir
Hedir is a busy website based around a peer reviewed directory, with a community of developers, moderators and reviewers and a much larger group who submit websites for approval in their directory. The idea is that people who submit websites should also review others, but not many of them seem to catch on to this, although it’s a great way of finding out what works and what doesn’t work on other people’s websites. The Hedir website also offers forums, and blogs for its members.
Every page on Hedir shows a couple of units of adverts from Google adsense, and they operate a revenue sharing scheme which I described in my earlier post ‘Adventures with Google Adsense, part 2′. It seems on the surface of it like a good idea and very cleverly done. However, as I discussed, after a month of fairly intensive posting, I had not made any money from it. As I’d been away for 10 days in the middle, I thought for a proper trial I’d give it another month of posting to review pages and forums. By the end of this I had posted about 300 times in total, and I think that gives it a very good chance of working if it’s going to.
The Alexa traffic rank of the site seems good, at around 32,000, but there are currently about 180 pages of sites listed in the review queue. I thought perhaps this meant that each page was hardly ever viewed. If they could bring in some way of requiring everyone who submits a site to do a certain number of reviews, that would bring the size of the queue down and get each page viewed more frequently, but it wouldn’t necessarily get more views for each member’s adverts.
Another reason for the tail off in Hedir adsense views when I was away is of course that once another review has been added to each page (which is presumably the reason for most of the page views), those ads won’t show up for my adsense id any more, meaning that those pages have been removed from the number still available for earning me adsense commissions.
Given the way that people use Hedir review pages, I think there is not likely to be much commission from revenue sharing ads, at least certainly not on the review pages - I can assume this was a typical couple of months. Forums may be viewed more often, being publicly available and linked from the front page, but forum ads are only linked to the last poster 20% of the time. They also offer blogs with adsense revenue sharing, an opportunity which I haven’t tried yet.
However, I did discover another benefit to posting on Hedir: people will sometimes follow the links in your posting’s signature. So I now have about 300 signatures posted on various Hedir pages, which are all currently linking to 3 of my customers’ websites, and I’ve been seeing more traffic coming to the websites from them.
Some members also think it may have an effect on the linked sites’ Google page rank, as the links have been known to show up in their Google Webmaster Tools accounts, but I don’t know how you could check whether there is specifically a page rank effect.