WidgetBucks Publishers Now Earning More Revenue from European Traffic

WidgetBucks is expanding its cost-per-click (CPC) network, giving publishers and bloggers two ways to earn revenue from their Western European traffic. Starting today in the United Kingdom, when publishers serve WidgetBucks ad widgets on their sites, visitors based in the UK will now see a short-duration CPM display ad followed by a CPC shopping widget featuring UK-based merchants and products listed in British pounds sterling. (see a sample UK screen shot here)

The CPM-CPC hybrid gives publishers two revenue streams from the same ad widget instance. Before today, only CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) ads were served to visitors outside the U.S. and Canada.

Additional Western European countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Belgium will come online over the next two weeks.

From a reporting standpoint, this CPC expansion is seamless. In addition to current CPM impressions, additional impressions will simply and automatically be tallied into CPC roll-up and daily totals, as well as resulting revenue. At this time, we are not breaking out by-country CPC impressions and earnings.

At the left is a breakdown of CPC and CPM Country Lists, the latter of which will continue to see only CPM advertisements.

WidgetBucks Updates International CPM Country List

WidgetBucks Updates International CPM Country List

Over the past few weeks, WidgetBucks' international advertisers have been concerned about traffic originating in certain countries. Even with fraud-protection, advertisers can deem traffic from certain regions non-valuable. As such, when advertisers no longer wish to pay for traffic to certain regions, WidgetBucks has to adapt and no longer offer traffic monetization to those regions.

Effective immediately, WidgetBucks is shortening the list of countries that pay on a CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) basis, meaning only traffic from the list of countries below will earn CPM revenue. Site visitors originating from countries not on the list will result in zero payout. Revenue earned through visitors from countries no longer on the list will still be paid through today, March 7.

If a WidgetBucks ad widget is placed on a site that is visited by a user in a non-paying country, that user will not see any ad content. And this does not involve or impact the recent roll-out of the "hybrid" widgets, which include a CPM display ad for U.S. and Canada traffic.

List of countries whose traffic continues to pay on a CPM basis:

• Australia (AU)
• Austria (AT)
• Belgium (BE)
• Denmark (DK)
• France (FR)
• Germany (DE)
• India (IN)
• Ireland (IE)
• Italy (IT)
• Netherlands (NL)
• New Zealand (NZ)
• Portugal (PT)
• Puerto Rico (PR)
• Singapore (SG)
• South Africa (ZA)
• Spain (ES)
• Switzerland (CH)
• United Arab Emirates (AE)
• United Kingdom (GB)

Over time, additional countries may return to the "approved" list, but only after ad partners become increasingly comfortable with the traffic trends and are willing to pay for ad content in those regions.