Quoting an email from WidgetBucks:

Publishers and bloggers will now have the ability to pick from over 125 pre-designed skins. There is something for everybody in the skins gallery. You can make your widget look like the Apple iPhone or choose a theme - such as basketball - that reflects you, your site’s “personality” AND the affinity of your visitors.

And that’s not all. You can use custom do-it-yourself tools to make each widget uniquely your own. Anybody can use these simple tools to create stylish widgets that will not only look good but bring in more bucks!

WidgetBucks has secured a $10 million investment to expand its ad network.

An excerpt from their blog post:

The investment was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the world’s premier venture capital firms. Ignition Partners, which supplied the company’s original venture backing, also participated in the financing. This investment really allows us to expand our vision as an ad network, which will only mean great things for our publishers.

The new 300×250 and 660×330 widgets have integrated search options.

The announcement also discloses the popular widgets and categories. The top five categories are MP3 Players, Laptops, Game Consoles, Flat Panel Televisions and Cell Phones, respectively. And when it comes to ad sizes, here are the top four (in order, total units used): 160×600 wide skyscraper, 728×90 leaderboard, 300×250 medium rectangle, and 468×60 full banner.

You can read my previous posts on WidgetBucks at the WidgetBucks archive.

In an email received from them today:

We are now serving CPM ads to the non-U.S./Canada traffic. This will give you revenue, per impression, for your site visitors who come from other countries. This is designed to help publishers who have a blend of traffic from a variety of countries. Our system will do the geo-location for you, determining where the visitor is coming from. Then we’ll either show the regular pay-per-click widget (to visitors from the U.S. and Canada) or show an ad that pays per impression (to visitors from other countries).

You will need to update the WidgetBucks code by getting it again from their website in order to enable this feature.

Unfortunately, they have not yet mentioned the CPM rates.

All you WidgetBucks publishers, if you have earned in excess of $50 in October, look forward to your cheques (or PayPal) coming your way shortly. I’m eagerly waiting for the payment to show up in my PayPal account.

For those who have not yet evaluated WidgetBucks, give it a try today.

• All non US/Canada traffic will now be paid on a CPM basis. The WidgetBucks system will do the geo-targeting and appropriately serve out ads. The pricing details have not yet been disclosed.
• Only audited payments will be shown under “My Widgets”. The reports will be generated on a daily basis and will only be the audited results (Currently shown in black. All the ones you see in red will not be shown).

These changes are going to be effective early December. I like the fact that they are thinking about their international customers now. Once more details are disclosed we will know if their CPM model will really fly or not.

For now at least, they seem to be thinking seriously about publishers and how best to look after their interests.

Thanks Mpire! Read more at their blog.

I spent some time thinking through a simplistic solution to get geo-targeted advertisements to improve RPC, especially for WidgetBucks.

One approach could be to have OpenAds installed on the server. But this is complicated to setup and not a solution that every blogger will be able to adopt. So what next?

I came across a tutorial at 999 Tutorials, which was simple and worked like a charm. I had it up and running in 10 minutes on one of my sites and its already serving out ads based on US Vs Non-US Traffic.

To get this to work, you will need to have your own domain and you should be a bit comfortable using PHP.

A few lines of PHP code taken from 999 Tutorials, and then a simple condition like the one below did the trick.

country = getCountryCode();

if($country == "US" || $country == "CA") // US or Canada
{
   // WidgetBucks ad comes here
}
else
{
   // Some other ad network here
}

This week seems to have had several disappointing announcements for bloggers.

Google AdSense changed it click zones which will surely drop earnings and WidgetBucks announced that they will stop paying for clicks from non-US traffic. Talk about dealing with bad news!

I’ve written a fair bit about WidgetBucks since it was launched, but this month my earnings have significantly dropped. In fact, daily earnings are down by as much as 75% compared to October. All this without the new terms taking effect. I guess its time to switch back to my old ad networks if things don’t improve in the next few days…

If you have a look at the “My Widgets” page in WidgetBucks you will see something like this below:

Its great to see earnings from referrals being reported regularly now rather than once at the end of the month. This will give us more clarity in terms of what are potential earnings for the month is going to be like.

Notice the “+” sign on the left of the image. Clicking on that will expand the box to show earnings per referral. Quite nice, I must say!

I’ve been a supporter of WidgetBucks since it was launched. It seems to be a very encouraging system and the payouts are one of the best I’ve seen off late; better than AdSense in my case.

The first report includes the signup bonus of $25 and earnings from referrals. You make 10% of the amount your referrals make for one year but the referral amount was quite low in my case.

This month though, I’ve seen a decrease in the amount paid per click. I just read the same thing reported by Darren Rowse at his blog.

For those who have not yet tried out WidgetBucks, sign-up now and make some cool cash!