It’s been exactly one week since I applied for an Infolinks account and used it as additional money-maker for the PMT site. I know, I’ve been late to join because thousands of bloggers have already joined this since early this year. Anyway, here’s what I have to say about Infolinks after using it for 1 week.
What is Infolinks?
Infolinks is an advertising program that inserts text link advertisements within the content of a website. The text ads usually appear as double-underlined links which show an informational bubble when a mouse hovers on it. Sample Infolinks ads can be seen in the PMT Forum.
I’ve known Infolinks since early this year but I was hesitant on using it because I really dislike seeing double-underlined links and automatic pop-up ads on the site. This explains why I use it only in the forum and not on the blog.
Anyway, after seeing good reviews from other bloggers, I decided last week to give it a try.
The Good
Getting your account approved was surprisingly quick. I applied for an account last week and within 1 day, my account was approved and the ads were already visible on the site.
Another good thing about Infolinks is that it is easy to use. You are given a simple snippet of code which you place somewhere on your site and you’re done. Unlike Google Adsense, you don’t need to tinker with the ad design or placement. Simply paste the Infolinks code on your site then the ads will appear instantly.
You also have control over the look of the ad links. You can choose the link color, single- or double-underlined links, number of ads that will appear per page, and ad content category. A downside is that, according to the site, changes will take effect within 2 hours, much longer than Adsense’s in which changes take effect within 10 minutes.
What about earnings? During the past week, I was able to earn an average of $1.50 per day. That’s based on around 50-60 clicks everyday. That’s still pretty decent, considering the ads are in the PMT Forum where most users don’t normally click on the ads (including Google Adsense ads). It is still not a lot compared to how much we’re getting from Adsense but it’s definitely a good addition to our online income.
The Bad
One major downside is the “annoying” nature of the ad. When you hover on an Infolinks text ad, the informational bubble automatically pops up. So for those not really interested in looking at the ad but accidentally hovered their mouse on a link, this might be really annoying.
In addition, some of the ads are not properly targeted to the niche of the site. In the PMT Forum, there are ad links for text such as “new,” “yesterday,” “at 11,” and even “Aug” — text that are not of interest and of value to most of our users.
Although Infolinks claim to pay the “best revenue share,” we still think Google Adsense pays more. For example, we got 50 ad clicks in Infolinks and got paid $2.00 while the same number of ad clicks would have already given us $8.00 in Adsense.
The Verdict
Overall, Infolinks is a good complement to other ad networks you are already using. On its own, however, the earnings it provides may not be that big, unless you have lots of visitors interested in clicking on the pop-up ads.
