I have a website with hundreds of links to external sites. I use
Google AdSense to monetize the space on my website and I thought that I can
make extra money by finding a way to monetize the outgoing links.
There are many url
shortening services that allow you to transform a long url to a short one more
suitable for sharing on social media. In particular, Twitter offers a limited
space for message and the characters of the embedded urls are counted.
Most of these url shorter
services will provide you this basic service possibly with some extras such as
statistics. Adfly (and few others) allows you in addition, to earn money when
people click on your shortened links. Before, they are directed to the original
url, they are shown an ad and you earn a small amount of money.
To use the monetization
service of Adfly you need first to register (create an account). Afterwards,
you can log in to your account, shorten urls and share them on social media or
on your website. You can also do this programmatically if you have lots of url
to shorten.
The registration
process and the implementation of the shortening procedure are easy and within
short time I was able to start earning money.
You need of course
a decent traffic and a good amount of clicks on the short urls. The ad stock of
Adfly is not huge but your CPM can go from 0.11 USD to 2 USD or a bit more
depending on the geographical location of your visitors.
I did not see
anything suspicious with Adfly. I can confirm from my experience that this is a
serious service. You can get paid through PayPal when you make only 5 USD
(compared to 100 USD for Google AdSense). I received many payments from Adfly
with exactly the earned amounts, timely and without any delays.
However, I decided
to stop using the service on my website for a different reason.
After,
experiencing with this method for few months, I realized that this is a quite aggressive
method for the visitors of my website. They are shown ads each time they click
on an external link with the necessity to wait at least few seconds before to
be able to skip the ad. In a first time, I limited programmatically the number
of shortened links for each session and spread them randomly.
I had few
thousands of ad views per day with most of my visitors coming from countries
outside the US or Canada. Therefore, I was not making a big amount of money
that can compensate the possible loss of visitors due to the annoying ads.
Conclusion:
Adfly is a serious
service, they allow you to monetize your links. They pay exactly what they promise.
They pay timely and accept PayPal. It allows you to make a small amount of
money if you have a lot of url to share and you can reach a large audience.
I do not recommend
to implement this Ad approach on a website since this is an aggressive method
that can considerably decrease the user experience and satisfaction and can
lead to loss of visitors.
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