Don’t Click This

It amazes me how many people buy into these ‘viral’ style advertising sites. What is that advantage for the John Doe’s, like myself, to sign up for this kind of directory, and pay money to have my site displayed? Any type of traffic that these sites bring in is next to worthless. I mean, who will go to the Million Dollar Homepage or bla.st to find a product they are interested in buying or content that they are interested in subscribing too? No one. It is complete hype. People go to these sites, see that there are bidding wars over the type 5 positions, and immediately assume that the service must bring in boat loads of visitors. In actuality, the only people benefiting are the ones who create the site and the hype. Kudos to Tim for creating a ‘viral’ product, but I can’t see any advantage to advertising on this site.

If you want your ad-based traffic to mean something, your best bet is to set up a standard CPC or CPM campaign on a related, established website (like John’s). Your best bet, however, is to attempt to rank well on search engines for related keywords because those results will last a lot longer than the hype will for sites like bla.st and MDHP.

Just my two cents.
Davis

Exactly. I really do think that once the hype dies, the site will more than likely follow suit, much like the MDHP part 2.

I posted about bla.st on a forum I visit and a few replies said it wouldn’t be a very good traffic generator and it was hinted that I should give it a go.

I did and went upto $5 a day for two days. It’s been up most the day and so far I’ve had

558 views
11 clicks
2.1% CTR

Not exactly great but there’s more than a day to go yet. I’ll be posting my results on my site when it’s over so keep a look out.

But in all honesty, I can’t see the daily $ going much higher than it is now.

11 clicks…it just doesn’t seem worth it at all.

hmm not long to go now until mine finishes. Someone has matched me though … no idea when they didn’t pay 1c more to take the top spot lol!

What’s your CTR been like?

It’s exactly 1% at the moment.

btw, are you interested in a link exchange?

Personally, I’m not impressed with bla.st. My guess is that conversions will be next to nothing - because it’s untargeted traffic.

Look at Chris’s results above, for example. $5/day and 11 or so clicks. That’s 45 cents a click for traffic that is NOT targeted. I just don’t see it yielding a positive ROI for people. My guess it it’ll just be a flash in the pan, though, I hope it’s not (I never like to see people or websites fail).

BTW, I notice that John Chow’s link is now at the very top of the bla.st webpage itself. It’s a text link that reads, “Hello to all visitors from JohnChow.com! Want to help promote bla.st and the bla.st advertisers? Digg bla.st here.”

After noticing this I can only really take John’s review of bla.st with a grain of salt. There’s a big benefit from getting a link listed there. Just look at all the people who may be Digging it!

Dont’ get me wrong, I like John. But once one has a “special” and exclusive place on a site for one’s own personal link, I think it’s hard to be 100% unbiased reagarding anything said from there on out.

Anyway, good luck to bla.st and all its advertisers. I do hope it works out for the longterm.

Shine on,
Aaron Cook

[…] Hardly impressive eh? Im guessing the vast majority of the visitors at the moment are people uploading their card etc and therefore wouldn’t be interested in clicking any of the link (or maybe just mine?). I very much doubt that situation will change either, I mean, who is going to goto bla.st to look for a new favourite website? You’d just use Google (or SlashMySearch* and get paid for it). Ian made a good post on his blog called Bla.st - I’m not convinced and my stats kinda proove his point. […]

Hi everyone! Thanks for all the comments. Sorry to hear some are disappointed with bla.st. Some thoughts:

- bla.st really isn’t getting much traffic yet, although it is steadily increasing, and reviews from John and lots of other bloggers are certainly helping.
- We should have made much clearer bla.st isn’t getting much traffic yet. We’ve put a notice on the payment screen saying this and that long term ads are more effective.
- The goal of bla.st is to make a free directory that’s actually useful, rather than a pixel advertising site. Try the “Sub Categories” when you’re on a page like blogs
- like any directory starting from scratch there’s a catch 22 that we won’t get visitors without cards, and it’s hard to attract advertisers without visitors.
- Some of the older cards have had hundreds of clicks eg. this cartoons card. Sure, not huge but for a small site this can be a big deal. It’s worth being on for a decent length of time, and we expect traffic to keep growing.
- You don’t have to pay a thing. I never imagined people would try paying $5/day at this stage. Then again, if Johns article had made the digg front page, $5 for 2 days might have been worth it.
- As the categories fill up, they become more useful and interesting eg. mac software or illustration.
- You can see how much traffic existing cards are getting by going into “big” view, then clicking “details” under any card
- Cards on the front page have lower CTR, as your card is shown to a wider range of people.
- Your card design makes a big difference to the number of clicks you’ll get. The popular section can give an idea of what’s working. The categories are more important for some cards, for example this horse card won’t get much traffic on the front page with all the tech people visiting.
- The stats are conservative, and only count modern ajax compatible browsers with javascript turned on.
- I’m no expert, but I believe bla.st will be good for search engines. They are crawling bla.st like crazy.
- If you are unhappy with how your short term bla.st card performed, contact me I’ll be happy to re-list your card as a long-term card, to the same total value, for free.

Sorry for the big post, any other thoughts, ideas or feedback would be great.
Regards,
Tim from bla.st

[…] For anyone who placed a card on bla.st, Tim has just left a comment on my previous post about bla.st: - If you are unhappy with how your short term bla.st card performed, contact me I’ll be happy to re-list your card as a long-term card, to the same total value, for free. […]

Tim -
You bring up a few valid points, but many of them are completely untrue.

A site like bla.st is TERRIBLE for search engine rankings. The way modern search engines (like Google) work is by assigning weight to outgoing links, so directories of any kind do not add to the ranking of a site (even if blast had a very high pagerank, the weight is being shared amongst far too many sites to help out the sites receiving links). Additionally, search engines look for links from RELATED sites, otherwise, they can consider them spammy. Because bla.st is a potluck of various categories (you see cards for Tech Blogs alongside AgLoco Spam), there is absolutely no relvancy among any of the links. The only sites that could potentially gain are the ones that are related to Marketing and are highlighted specifically in your blog (away from the link farm that is the front page).

Also, why would people go to a small directory like this instead of Google to find what they are looking for? Google ranks sites based on their relevancy, NOT by higher payments like bla.st does. When you search in a search engine, you will find a site that matches exactly what you are looking for. When you go to bla.st, you recieve a hogepoge of pictures from people with money to spend. I don’t know about you, but when I am looking for something in a search engine, I almost always use the targeted, organic results and NOT the paid sponsors on the right. If the only incentive to use your site, is that it is visual, then there is no way it will survive once the initial hype dies.

It is obvious that you are aware of the shortcomings of your site, which is why you are willing to re-list cards for free. If bla.st was actually helping sites, then there would be no reason to do this.

But, again kudos to the site. It looks great and functions exactly as a ‘visual directory’ should. I’m not trying to hate on bla.st, I was simply burned by the MDHP and thus sites like these have left a bitter taste in my mouth. I don’t want to see others fall into the same trap that I did.

-D

[…] Bloggers flocked to put their cards up on bla.st after John Chow posted his paid review of the site on his page. But in this Internet age of instant gratifications people are disappointed that their cards aren’t generating much traffic (if any) to their sites. […]

I’ve been reading Tim’s blog since I found it back in January (if I recall right) and he has become kind of a mentor thanks to his vast knowledge in promoting Bla.st.

The job he has made looks amazing to me visually, the site is just a perfect example of a very well integrated 2.0… I wish my site looks more than his…

anyway, there’s a point when people sound not happy enough with the traffic they have receive… as Tim says, there’s a catch with new directories: no content, no visitors… and no visitors, no content generators… I faced the same problem with my website: www.egaroo.com. It was supposed to be paid, but people didn’t made any purchase (thanks God) so I decided to make it free. In this business model I think it’s the only way to go if you don’t want to get unhappy “clients”.

I know it is really hard to compete with those monsters like Google, but hey, I think there’s still place and new approaches to explore free promotion (or paid) to interesting websites.

In my case, egaroo has become sort of a personal recopilation of interesting websites I find on Internet, and yes, I may seem a little deceptive since some of the banners there have been uploaded by myself. Am I doing wrong if I try too hard to create content where there was none before? Any hint? I’m totally new at this (creating a directory myself) and Tim’s guidance (I’m not sure if he’s aware of how much he has inspired me) has helped me keep the fight.

Kuddos and all the best wishes to him and Bla.st. I’m still think free is the only way to go.

In my opinion, there are sites designed more for the media buzz and the entertainment element. MillionDollarHomePage was a huge success because of its novelty and fad-effect. It is not intended to reach a targeted audience. Nonetheless, I find it fun to click around on the various pixels.

In order to be targeted, there has to be a specific audience in mind from the beginning. USCompaniesByState.com is an advertising platform designed specifically for local companies within each state in America to reach others near their geographic region.

Such a platform would encourage more commercial relationships between companies that are able to arrange transactions rather quickly. It creates buzz closeby and it is highly targeted, therefore capable of producing better conversion results at the end of the day. If you are a company in any of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, be sure to take a look at USCompaniesByState.com