It has finally happened! Crenk has been recognised by Popurls.com and added to their famous aggregator of everything great on the web.
Popurls was launched by Thomas Marban back in March of 2006 and since then has been dominating the world of “single page aggregators”. Other sites have been copying the structure of Popurls, such as Alltop and others, but nothing can really compete at the moment.
Of course our link isnt at the top of the Popurls site, but we have been featured in the “quickies” section, along side Techcrunch, Techmeme, Centernetworks and ReadWriteWeb. This is a great honour for our site and just goes to show that hard work and producing good content can actually get you somewhere.
Back in early November of last year, I preempted the launch of Spottt. Spottt is a free link exchange between sites via a 125 x 125 widget. Spottt is developed by the guys over at Adbrite, so they have a product that needs to work and actually launch into something worthwhile. Since Adbrite has had a lot of VC Funding, they will be really expected to not just launch a product for the sake of it, and actually turn it into a commercial entity.
This brings me to the all important point, is Spottt actually going anywhere? Currently, the site is so simplistic and has a lot of competitors doing exactly the same thing. So where is it unique selling point? If I was the VC in Adbrite who put in a slice of the money, then I would expect an out strategy for Spottt and within a year or two at the most. Will this actually happen? and what features are really missing from Spottt or sites like Spottt?
TNX is a text sales marketplace, but as I have found out, it is also a whole lot more. The site itself and services are very similar to Text-Link-Ads, but with so many more features and opportunities to make your site a lot more profitable.
The TNX system is based upon a points system, where more points are required to purchase links on pages. One text link can be purchased for as little as 1 point, with 1000 points available for just over a dollar. TNX currently has over 46000 members and they have sold over 25 million links.
The main advantage for a publishers within the system is the option onnot only selling text links on your home page, but also selling them individually on each page, this making your potential profit a lot higher. Additionally, publishers can also manually accept or deny advertisers through the platform, allowing a lot more control over inventory and keep relevance within their pages. As we all know Google dont like the companies or publishers who sell text links, thus publisher control their relevance and also advertisers can use a special tool from TNX to make all text links Google acceptable.
Finally, TNX have a great Partner (affiliate) program which allows publishers to place banners on their sites and make 13.3% TNX points made by their referrals. These points can quickly add up and will allow you to place a great deal more text links throughout the sector.
TNX is on the rise and is by far the best Text marketplace out there. Make sure you head over and give it a try today.
Spottt the new free service from the people at Adbrite must be launching soon. This is just a hunch on my part, because I have seen a spottt 125 x 125 ad placed on the ever popular Techcrunch. Now, no company is going to spend $10,000 for a monthly ad slot on Techcrunch if they dont even have a product or service. Thus, leading me to believe they will be launching very soon!
I have been reading around the blogosphere today and there seems to be a buzz around Google and if they are dropping PageRankings due to sites selling Text Link Ads. Google has admited to SearchEngineLand that if sites sell text links then their page rankings might drop. I have noticed that a few month ago Crenk was a PR4 and now since i have added Text Link Ads it has dropped to a PR1, for no real reason. Who else has been seeing a drop in traffic and or page rank?
