Counter Offer Shenanigans on Sponsored Reviews

As it can be seen from the Disclosure Policy conveniently located in the footer of this website, I admit that while they are very few and far between, I will occasionally accept a sponsored review from a business or advertiser looking to generate buzz to their website or about their product or services.

A service that a great deal of experienced bloggers utilize in order to sell a sponsored review on their website is Sponsored Reviews. With its clean and easy to use interface, I personally find it to be a little less annoying than PayPerPost, which virtually every person with a website has ran to for some extra cash at one point or another. The way Sponsored Reviews works is a little different than what most bloggers are used to. In order to write a sponsored review you must select categories for your website, write a short description about it and then bid on reviews that advertisers have put in the marketplace that match the category in which you have placed your blog under.

Today I have run into something completely new to me when it comes to Sponsored Reviews–The advertisers’ ability to counter offer. While I have only accepted two offers on this website and those have been put on my other website only, I was a little surprised when I saw that an advertiser had sent me a counter offer on a recent bid I had made for this website. As most of you may have heard, Google PageRank has recently updated and when that happens, I always take a few moments to really dig through my statistics and see where this website stands as opposed to other websites in the same niche. After analyzing my overall statistics, I then go through my website listings that I have on services such as Sponsored Reviews and adjust my prices accordingly. Apparently, however, advertisers are likely to disagree with your proposal.

Just a few hours after bidding on a post I received an email of a counter offer over 75% lower than what I had offered in the first place. After wondering for a great deal of time if I had missed something and then realizing that advertisers are just generally known for counter offering bloggers ridiculous prices that are obviously beneath them, I counter offered them–For my original asking price.

So here is a lesson to all of the bloggers who utilize review services in order to help buy the groceries at the end of the month–When your bid receives a counter offer from an advertiser when you know damn well that the price they are countering you for is so obviously beneath you, do not buckle at the mere chance of a few dollars. As a web publisher, you must know where you stand and if you feel your website is worth $5 a post then by all means, you should most definitely be accepting $5 a post; however, if you feel as if your work is worth more, than you should be accepting no less than what you believe you are worth for your work.

adgridwork Production Analysis

adgridwork is a new site that functions along the same lines as BlogRush. Their mission is to provide free advertising for websites.

The mission is outstanding. As soon as BlogRush launched, bloggers flocked to it by the thousands and they saw a turnout with blogger participation that they most likely did not foresee. The same goes for adgridwork. Bloggers are jumping on the bandwagon with this website because let’s face it, who doesn’t love free advertising? The more people being introduced to your website, the better and I’m no different.

I used to use BlogRush on this website, as well as another site I run and after a trial of 30 days, I logged in to see what my statistics were. Like many bloggers who have used this website, I saw no significant difference in the traffic I was receiving and decided to stop using the program. adgridwork has proved to be the same.

I tested adgridwork out for a trial period of 30 days at my other website, which already does decent with traffic, especially for being a newer website. After the 30 days, I logged into the website to check out my statistics.

As you can see from the summary above, an ad for my website was requested and shown on other websites several thousand times; however, the traffic received from using adgridwork was two hits.

When dealing with advertising, many factors must go into why (in most cases) ads prove ineffective.

First of all, people tend to spend a very large portion of their days online. What they do online includes checking their email. If you use an email provider such as Gmail, such as I do, or any other web platform email, you are seeing ads immediately and ads are displayed during the entire duration that you are logged in.

Social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook are also very large contributing factors as to why people spend so much time online. These websites are great time wasters and also (although MySpace has a much higher ad count than Facebook and other sites due to how extremely popular it is) display ads throughout their websites.

Another grossly large detail in ad campaigns is that almost all bloggers are looking to make money online. Blogging for profit has become extremely popular and those who are looking for blogging to literally pay off are latching onto websites such as BlogRush, adgridwork and many others in order to get free advertising to their websites so they move up in rank and then they fall prey to blogging for money resources such as PayU2Blog, PayPerPost, Text-Link-Ads and a myriad of others. In addition to these obvious-ads people are placing on their websites in order to receive income from their blogs, almost every blog right now has Google Adsense ads running on their websites, myself included.

Due to the amount of people in the blogosphere and those who are looking to get their websites known, once someone sees the same ad set up several thousands of times on several thousands of different websites, your mind become numb to them. The mind simply refuses to register that they are even there because of the amount of times you have already seen them–You simply do not notice them anymore. If you’re not even noticing that ads are on a website to begin with, what makes people think that others are going to click on their ads? To the random person, they are seeing your blog and reading what you have to say but they are not seeing your ads because of the amount of times the same, exact set up has been seen on many different websites.

With taking all of this into consideration, it is no wonder that while my ad had been displayed over 12,000 times, only two people actually saw it and clicked on it.

Another fact to mention is that when looking at ads that were being placed on my website through adgridwork, the same six ads kept showing up over the course of a month. So, perhaps when adgridwork takes the blogging world by storm and more people sign up, more ads will be displayed since that only makes sense, but when signing up with these free advertising websites, we must take into consideration that the outcome of them are most likely not going to be effective, as less than 1% of people are actually clicking on them in the first place.

I am taking the adgridwork ads off of my other website today and perhaps I will test out other programs to see if they prove to be any better; however, I am not counting on it.