Oxado in, Oxado out
A week ago I applied for Oxado advertisements, and after a week of placement in the most visible area of my site, I have since completely removed them for several reasons:
- With the 468×60 banner, nothing would show up about 70% of the time! When it did, it was usually in the wrong language (German or Slavic). They do select advertisements based on the country you’re accessing my site from so I’m guessing that there aren’t many Italian advertisers.
- When no ad showed up, the ad space didn’t collapse down and would leave a big blank space. They don’t offer the ability to display alternative ads in that space in the case that there is nothing to display.
- With the 300×250 ad unit, the only ads that showed up were Oxado’s own. I suspect those were the €0.01 clicks.
- When someone actually clicked, the average payout was €0.01-0.05. I did get one click for €0.29.
- Doing a little investigation, I discovered that Oxado just resells TradeDoubler’s advertisements, which means I can skip the middleman and make more money simply by signing up directly with TradeDoubler.
They are highly restrictive in that if you even change the color scheme of your site, you have to submit for reapproval. You cannot place ads on any other page than the page you submit for approval.I may be mistaken regarding this point as I can’t find where I saw those specific statements before.
I realize a week isn’t long enough to do a fair review of their service, but it was a complete waste of space and actually cost me money by taking up space that could’ve be better utilized.
I have a sneaking suspicion that their business model is to get publishers to sign up, use it for a few weeks, then abandon their accounts when they realize the futility of reaching the €100 payout level with the low quality ads that they offer. They then pocket the customer’s balance as pure profit. Very sly. Evil, but sly.
Google does this as well to some level, but they at least give you a large selection of ads that people will actually click on making it fairly easy to hit the $100 payout level in a month. With Oxado, based on a the sad 0.06% click rate their ads received multiplied by the average click payout amount (€0.04), it would take 41,000 visitors a month to reach the monthly payout level of €100. With AdSense, 41,000 visitors in a month would equal around $2,000-4,000 a month in revenue. Of course, at 41,000 visitors a month you shouldn’t be dinking with AdSense but selling 150×150 ad spaces at $1,000 a week.
Bottom line, don’t waste your time with Oxado.
Comments (5)
That’s funny, I just removed my Oxado ads last night too! I tried them for about a week, but during that week I didn’t earn a single cent and with the €100 payout I figured that I would never reach that and so it was a waste of space. TextLinkAds actually have NO payout limit if you’re using PayPal for the payouts, which I think is fabulous. I should be expecting a payout from them next week
I signed up for TextLinkAds, but they told me to take a hike! More than likely because I’m not ranked on Alexa.
Hi,
Just to correct a few factual errors:
- the ads shown are selected based on each visitors country and language. That means each visitor might see different ads, and that the ads the owner of the website will see are not necessarily the same ones visitors will see if they are in different countries or use different languages.
- Oxado does not just use Tradedoubler ads, but ads from a variety of sources, including Yahoo! Search Marketing, Miva, Genieknows, Searchfeed, Tradedoubler and others. The ads available vary based on the country and language of each visitor, and the keywords found of course. For some markets you might indeed only have Tradedoubler ads, but visitors in other markets may see other ads. We give you access to an ad inventory of several million ads this way. Note also that we provide automatic contextualization of ads from all these sources, which you generally can’t get directly.
- I don’t know where you have seen that you would have to resubmit your site if you change its color scheme, that’s quite untrue. As long as the site still matches the original submission criteria (in terms of acceptable content, etc.), we certainly don’t require re-submission.
- Likewise, you can use the banner code on any page of the site you submitted, and you certainly don’t have to submit each and every page.
This being said, results can vary widely depending on the topic of a website and on the targeted markets, so some people might not get good results, while others will. We do pay lots of affiliates each and every month, so surely it is not impossible to reach the 100 euro payout limit.
Hope this clarifies a few things.
Thank you for your comments, Jacques. It speaks very well of a business when one of the founders personally takes time to respond to a negative review.
The fact that your ad engine displays ads based on the location of the visitor is something I would consider a plus. The problem is that it was showing mainly German ads on my site and something that was mentioned to me by other Italian visitors. I didn’t ask anyone in the US what language the ads were in, but I no reason to believe that they were in any language other than English.
Regarding the last two points, I can’t find the exact statements that I was referring to on your website, so I’ve struck those lines. If I was mistaken, I apologize for providing incorrect information.
The main problem with your service is the quality of ads that are displayed. If they are in the wrong language, not relative to the content of the site, or don’t even show up, no one’s going to click on them and publishers have no incentive to leave them up — no matter how popular the site. After replacing Oxado ads with Google AdSense, I’ve made more in one day than I made all week at Oxado. As a side point, the majority of my visitors come from the US.
I really wanted your service to work because it pays in Euros, but in the end it just didn’t work for me. Perhaps it’s the low selection of targeted ads or your ad engine doesn’t contextualize the site correctly. Perhaps your service works best for US users or MFA sites, I honestly don’t know. But as a European publisher, Oxado ads’ CTR was dismally low in a spot where ads average a CTR of 3% per 1,000 customers. That speaks more towards the type of advertisements displayed than anything.
Thanks again for your comments.
Two points about longer-term Oxado-ing. First, I have to agree that $100 takes an unfairly long time to earn if the agency wants to treat all its publishers well.
Second, the holding account’s earnings drop-off towards the end, so I am left with €96.94 month-in month-out. I realise there’s a recession, but another scheme – Adbrite – is increasing its revenue on from the same sites.