Calculating Potential In Text Ads Revenues This is the most frequent question I get from website publishers before they integrate in-text ads for the first time. Fine, they say, we understand that they’re fast, relevant, subtle, don’t take place or require changes, but from the monetization point of view – how much can we earn from in-text ads? I wish I could answer this with a number, for example, $12,430 per month, but it’s not that simple. I can answer, however, with some rules and a simple formula to calculate your website’s potential in-text revenues. It would take some basic terminology...

The Color of Money The color of the ad links on your website’s pages has a significant impact on your potential revenues. When addressing the issue of the link’s format, I suggested that website publishers should make a clear distinction between the in-text ad links and other hyperlinks, preferably by using double underline format. This distinction may reduce clicks on the short term, but on the long term will improve your user experience and your bottom line revenues (read Tip #1). Choosing the right color for your ad links contributes to this distinction, but it has much more to it. Attention...

Distinction and Temptation Despite the temptation of short term increase in click through rate, avoid hiding the in-text links and use a distinct format like double underline. And I’m happy to elaborate… The hooks – those hyperlinks that yield a bubble upon mouse hover – are the key to website monetization with in-text ads. When the provider’s algorithm works well, the keywords selected for hooks will be of interest to the reader and relevant to the content. When a reader actually is interested in the highlighted term, she will hover over it with the mouse, consider the ad within the...

If you’ve been reading this far, you probably know by now that I like in-text ads as a website monetization solution that doesn’t interrupt visitors, and that I even work for Infolinks… But I do know that some people out there are still against in-text. So to help them out, I thought I would come up with the top ten reasons not to use in-text ads. This way, when your in-text-loving friends brag about how good they are, you will be armed with some reasons why not to use in-text ads. 1. They don’t jump around We all just love flashy animated banners that do anything technology allows them...

What is In Text Advertising? Definition: In Text Advertising is a method of advertising where advertisements are placed as hyperlinks within existing text. [see also the Wikipedia definition for In Text Advertising] This short definition encapsulates the whole concept in just a few words, but as it usually happens with short explanations, each of the words count and some further clarifications are required. First of all, it’s a method of advertising. There are many reasons to include hyperlinks within text online – in fact, that’s the essence of the Web – but here, we’re discussing a...

When advertising agencies discovered the Internet they gave the new medium’s ads different names: digital advertising, online advertising, interactive and combinations of these and a few other words. But whatever the name, the first references and discussions involving the new advertising arena always came from the advertiser’s point of view – how can the advertising budget be allocated online? Only later on, the completing angle of the publishers got attention as well – why and how should websites place ads? In other words, first, there were services like Google Adwords and Yahoo Sponsored...

What makes those double underline links so promising as a method of advertising? It’s the crucial difference between interruption and permission. Although this concept still seems very fresh, the idea was presented by Seth Godin a decade ago in his marvelous book Permission Marketing, and if you still haven’t read it, it’s never too late. Traditional advertising is based on grabbing the attention of people away from what they’re doing – TV commercials, newspaper ads, telemarketing phone calls, and even online display banners. Godin calls this Interruption Marketing and shows how it’s...

I generally dislike discussions about new media that start with ancient history and the development of the Internet in the sixties of the previous century. We’re beyond that. This said, however, there is much to learn from comparisons of the Internet’s evolvement with other media in the past. And if there is one clear pattern that repeated itself in all media – newspapers, radio, broadcast television, cable television, and lately the Internet – it is the penetration of advertising. We’ve seen it before – from a medium where ads are not allowed, to organizations who protest against the...

People filter out the ads. This is true on TV, in a newspaper, and mostly – online. We read online content, look at pictures, view videos, but we don’t notice the ads. Fighting back, the advertising industry launched a battle over the attention of online readers. Wonderful companies like Eyeblaster pushed the evolution of banners forward and, in fact, saved the monetizing business. Banners began jumping around, animated characters walked onto our screens, full page ads covered sites entirely, and when moving the mouse away from the content, we mistakenly activated sound from banner ads. Even...