Auction ads going to hell

Has anyone considered that maybe the reporting was screwed up in june and reporting numbers that were too high? (thus you got more then you were suppose to)

 

I have, though I'm willing to bet it's much easier to assume the other way around. Especially when there is no real word from the powers that be.

I'd love to see the form letter stating that's the case, lol...

Dear publisher, we are sorry to inform you that you have been grossly over paid in the months of June and July. According to our records you should have earned only $0.36 though received $860.00. Please forgive our reporting errors for those months. In the future we will do our best to maintain the correct stats.​

 

Wow Joey, that's a different approach. I gotta +rep you for imagination!

 

Conspiracy theory...

It's already been brought up that the previous owners bloated their numbers to increase the sales price to MediaWhiz. I think the idea is most certainly plausible. Even with MW being part owners from the start...they were there for support and for being the go between from the public (us) to the rest of the backend. It's pretty clear they were clueless on that aspect, the proof is in their blog comments. I'd point out which ones, but they've yet to be approved out of the queue

 

No - Jeremy is good friends with the people at MediaWhiz. I dont believe Jeremy would have deliberately bloated the numbers. If that was the reporting error, it was accidental.

 

im not sure about AA. im pissed they raised to min payout to $50 to be honest. so i have to admit that my run with AA is over. sorry mediawhiz you have screwed up. further more if anyone does anyone know if AA is partnered with ebay for tracking purposes?

 

They are partnered with eBay

 

First I want to say that it's rare I whinge about anything, especially in this industry, everything varies from site to site, niche to niche so it is hard to be subjective. I was one of the people who were raving about AA for the first two months encouraging people to join, and no I didn't use a referral.

But in the case of Auction Ads it's very obvious that something is seriously wrong, for every report of things being fine there are 20 saying it's not working.
IF and I regard it as a big IF some people are reporting that their earnings from AA are equal to or rising since July then those people are getting treated very differently to the rest of us.

Reporting is still rubbish, my income is at $3.22 for this month.
I still receive impressions and even clicks from a site that doesn't even exist anymore, it hasn't for over two months
My CTR is set in stone at 0.05 .... no matter what the impressions/clicks state. In the beginning my CTR was ~ 8%.

Heres the latest comments from another Forum where the members got into Auction Ads.
Myself and all these guys own very high traffic sites in a niche that is a perfect fit for Auction Ads, I don't think any of these people receive less than 100k unique visitors a day.
I could quote more people but they own much smaller sites, anyway this gives you the picture.

 

Another possibility is that all of our regular members bought stuff in that first month or so, then ran out of money

it's at least plausible, as it in order for us to earn, our visitors must spend. So it would be interesting to know how many of the sites "losing" money have forums, blogs, or other sites that would have a larger regular member base as compared to those that consist mostly of unique traffic.

 

Well, there are other things as well. For example, eBay in September is offering discounted listing fees - so they arent charging as much, hence our revenue will be down because of it.

My income hasnt taken the hit some of you are complaining about, which is what boggles me. People claiming of going from several hundred a month to next to nothing just doesnt make sense to me looking at my own stats.

 

Whatever the reason, it's certainly easier to blame the messanger then it is to blame ourselves. It would be nice to hear something from our MiddleMan (MediaWhiz).

And I think that is one of the problems...whatever the cause for lower stats is only hitting SOME publishers. As you are not getting hit by it, shows that my theory may be just that, a guess. You have a few forums with it running... are the forum stats still pretty consistent, compared to any non-forum/non-member type sites?

 

I'm still EXTREMELY curious about E-Bay sign-ups and if they are being paid out to us and where they are being tracked. If the referral box on the Account Page is for AA referrals, then where are the E-Bay sign-up referrals being tracked? I also want to know if we're all getting the higher E-Bay payout percentage since we're all technically under 1 CJ account. Isn't that the point of this entire thing??????

 

From my understanding (from reading posts here on DP, so take it as that) is we are all under one account, which means higher pay-outs to us. Switching to CJ will lower your payout, as you'll be on a lower paying tier. In a way, that makes it a toss up on what can produce a bigger income. AA with it's odd reporting, or CJ with it's lower income potential.

Ebay reporting is on the CJ level as well, and is something only MediaWhiz can likely see. As we are under them, we have to reply on them getting the correct reports from CJ/E-bay and then to pass those reports via their interface to us. I'd assume we'll never see just what they see, as we are individuals under a group system.

For referrals, we use the system as given by AuctionAds, and not through whatever specials that Ebay offers, as we are 3rd party publishers. This will also likely not change on our level, unless something happens on the EBAY level which could prompt change from our middle man (Auctionads).

As for whether or not the reports are being accurate between Ebay > CJ > MediaWhiz/AuctionAds is something we may never know...but then, that would likely be the same with any middleman type publisher and the final reporting.

 

It boggles us who it's happening to. And it's the majority by a long way who are being screwed. It seems to be a select few who whose income isn't being seriously affected.
I will swear on a stack of bibles that when I say my income is down as much as it is that it's the truth.
I also know that what the people are saying in the quotes in my post above are accurate.

 

That's not a correct statement. If you read the AA payout paragraph they send you directly to E-Bay to read the payouts. AA has not setup their own payout structure different than E-Bay. So whatever E-Bay is doing, AA should be doing the same.

 

Auction ads will continue for a long time since it costs virtually nothing to run. But people will gradually stop using auction ads since there are so many issues. The blog is a joke. Obviously they are oblivious or choosing to ignore the problems.

 

yeah, you're probably right, hosting probably 10+ dedicated servers doesn't cost anything

 

And if any case you don't seem to be satisfied with the end results, you always have the liberty to switch to a new platform

 

Lets keep in mind - only a small number of publishers have been commenting on this.

As for my numbers - Comparing my best month, June, to this month I am only about 12% lower then June. Now, as I recall, eBay is running a free listing fee promotion this month - so thats going to impact our revenue as well, and is of no fault of AA. Also consider that AA had the ad display issues last weekend, which also impacted revenue for 2 days.

Looking at all that - I see my revenue being basically the same or slightly better then June.

SO, when someone says they made $xxx in june and $x in september - I have to wonder why and if its all AA's fault. The revenue may have dropped, but did you add min price tags, or change keywords? Is the traffic off? Is the source of the traffic different? Were you getting traffic from google for a particular keyword that you no longer rank well for? Was June numbers due to the ads being new and people clicking out of curiosity? There are lots of possible factors. Just comparing one month to another isnt accurate.

 

Almost every report I've seen show that even adsense makes more then AuctionAds. I dropped them a month ago, and most the sites that I seen jump on the bandwagon have removed the ads as well.

I think they are in competition with CJ to much, they have the same setup with ebay and ppl make more money.. I haven't tested this route and I doubt I will with my current sites.