Hello DP users, A close friend of mine has a popular program on download.com that's about to reach 100,000 downloads. It got a lot of attention after it was mentioned in PC magazine and several popular blogs. Now my friend has asked my help to find a way to make money with the program. The program itself is freeware (I'm guessing that's one of the reasons it's very popular) and he wants to keep it this way. He has thought about making it shareware but doesn't want to go that route. So what we have decided is a way to make money using the programs own search function. It's basically a field where users put in what they are searching for on the web. Since adsense for search doesn't allow traffic to be sent to it from programs he has been sending a ton of free traffic to google.com where it shows the results. He doesn't get paid for any of this and to this day the program has been simply running on donations by people. Now my question for everyone here, what program/affiliate company/etc... would you use if you have a %search_string% keyword as a variable that you can pass on to any url with your id within the url. We are looking for a company that will show relevent results on a webpage we send them to for the keywords they searched for. (example: someone uses the Search the web function of this program to search for "auto insurance". The program launches the persons defualt web browser to url: some-ppc-company.com/user007/searchstring=%auto%insurance%. And we get paid when a person on that page clicks on one of the sponsored links. Thank you for reading this far. I appreciate it and thanks in advance to those that reply back with a suggestion or two program info: It's a small utility program that people download for their windows desktop that sits in their taskbar (uses very little system memory) which does various useful commands. (ex. one click deletes entire internet temp files/history. Some programs out there do just this function are for sale for $20 - $30, but this one is free and it does a number of other functions in windows [ex. encrypt predefined folder with one click). Sorry but he has asked me not to include the program name since he is talking to two companies right now on monetizing the program. Not sure if the deal is even going to happen.
Hm cant you make it link to a website where you have the search function, like the website of the program itself, just make a search page there. And you can put up some adsense ads on that page too.
We can do that, but that would make it harder on the user. That would mean they would have to click on a button in the program which launches the browser then enter the search string in a box on the site. It would make it much easier if the search box is within the program and we can somehow pass that info to a url. I know this is possible.
well yes, make it open the search result in a browser, and have adsense on the page that opens. That should be rather easy to do, and I guess it would be allowed by Google too.
He needs to talk to Google about it because they make exceptions. Such as with Opera, Opera was displaying AdSense ads related to the page's content because they had a special deal. maybe he can get one similar...
The only one I know is Q-ads. Look at the bottom right corner box for more info. I never used them nor do I know if that’s exactly what you’re looking for but I guess it’s worth a try.
They don't allow it to be used in programs but thanks for the link. This is straight from their site: To fsmedia: We don't have that amount of traffic needed to qualify for a special deal with Google. They only take partners that receive substantial amount of traffic. We are still searching. Please keep the suggestions coming
Emperor thanks for the link but I will have to send an email to the company to see what they allow and what they don't.
I'm not sure which program you are talking about but google does't allow that. We have found something that we think will work, but we are still in talks with the company. thank you everyone for your replies. I'm going to let this thread die out.
Suggestions: Sell Ads: Give reference to the program and have people buy ad space on it on periodical basis. You should have the liberty to change the ad space whenever you want Bundled program: I won't recommend this, but some companies will give you their programs which you can bundle up with the software and give to the person, although this might make you go out of download.com, so well don't bother if your major download source is download.com The search feature: You can use the search feature so that when the people do search they end up searching Google through your website. That would be pretty neat actually. I don't think Google can ban you for that? Expert comments needed. Pop up advertising: This isn't exactly like the real popups, you could have a pop up generate every 20 minutes on the users computer with a text message from whatever advertiser you have sold that space to, it could be something like "Hey there! Visit xxxxx.com too please sometimes, Thanks" IT
I had this same problem a few months ago and decided the best way to make money off of freeware apps is to setup the site so people can contribute ideas/code and setup a forum for general computer/tech talk and load it with adsense. We also setup an articles section with the latest security news (its a firewall application) and hardware/software review section wich brings in more money from adsense and amazon sales.
easiest way i could think about is to add links to his programmer page (as aditional info on download.com, in docs, under "help") and then put some small ads on this site (text link ads in header maybe)