Earlier this week I thought about the viral potential of ad sales, and what struck me was the lack of bloggers being able to use their readership to sell their ads for them! So, I created an affiliate system to work along side everything else, which I would hope will be a big future selling point. Readers can signup for an affiliate link, earn a percentage, and everybody’s happy!

Also got an API up and running (in its early stages) to combat the problem of blogger “isolation”. Slowly but surely, I’m managing to put together what I think is now a unique package, with a lot of potential. Not that I’m biased or anything!

Based on currently pricing with links being nofollow, it could take 3 months or more just to be able to afford the plugin upgrade from the free version for average bloggers (not the top 5%)

Your marketplace currently seem to be around 20 bloggers despite some reasonable coverage on multiple “make money” blogs, thus there definitely seems to be some evidence that my evaluation was at least with some merit.

Simon might be missing a few features if I did a head-to-head, but likewise so would WP Text Ads, and such a comparison would be head-to-head with the full version.

I think Simon has a better business model, and one possible avenue to explore would be to join forces.

Simon has started well with his plugin. We’ve just become friends and I hope he does well.

I’d just like to point out that WP Text Ads can be used for free.

It costs $127 for the upgrade to show unlimited links. The free version is somewhat limited, but it can make more than enough to cover the one-time license fee. If a blogger doesn’t sell enough links to cover that cost, then he can use the free version forever.

Your statement seems to give the impression that WP Text Ads is not free. I would appreciate it if you could make that clarification.

Alex

Tagging – again a good point, although when I did consider it I kept coming back to the viewpoint that when a blog owner is editing / writing a post, and they have tagging enabled, would it not be just as effective to let the them add in the tags? Maybe not.

This is the reason I put the code under GPL though, since wordpress is a large community, and hopefully a few users will contribute their improvements. Of course that may not happen, but I don’t like the idea of encrypting code or limiting its usage.

The one big plus point over wp-bankroll that I can see is the use of contextual linking (unless that’s been put in recently, I haven’t checked in all honesty). I do however agree that more work needs doing on the fine control aspects (ie. allowing different attributes for different link types etc).

On the marketplace side, I agree that in its current state it won’t replace something like PPP or ReviewMe – something to be (and already is being) worked on. An hour or 2 ago I was drafting the first monthly newsletter for the site, where I noted just that, and laid out some ideas for improvement.

Paul Hancox