Saturday, January 6, 2007 at 10:10:23 AM
I'm sure a few of you are trying to figure out what the deal is with all of those home-made ads on the right-side of the page. Well, first let me explain what they are and what they do.
The ads on the right are known as CPL-ads, which stands for Cost Per Lead. The old ads that we had on the site--the really flashy and obnoxious ones--those were CPM ads, or Cost Per Thousand (M being the Latin symbol for thousand). What's the difference? Well, one form of advertising is totally passive, while the other form requires an action by the user in order to trigger a payment.
For example, our old advertising network, Blue Lithium, they used to pay Search Kindly about $1 for every 1000 users who would see one of their ads. And being that we sometimes had four of their ads on the page, we were making around $4 for every 1000 pageviews. LeadVance, the company that is behind all of the current CPL ads, pays us only when our users go the extra mile and fill out a little form or something. Now, those CPL ads pay A LOT more than CPM ads, but they also ask so much more of the user. Not only are you required to take the time to fill out a form, you are also forced to deal with the junk email that may come from having filled out that form. But it's all in the name of charity, right?
Because I know that there is the possibility of getting some unwanted mail, I threw up that warning message. As much as I wanted every single user of Search Kindly to fill out a form (doing so generates anywhere from 85-cents to $3...per user), I don't want to be responsible for what might be a result of that action. So if you're going to donate for free in that respect, please use an email address where you send your junk email...or create one specifically for that purpose. Before you do that, however, I really need to make this following statement clear:
Please do not create multiple email accounts just to donate a lot of money to charity. That will only bite Search Kindly in the ass later on.
Ok, so now to the cheating part...the reason that we have the CPL ads in place now (and are no longer showing the regular banners) has to do with the fact that we had some jerkwad who was really screwing around with the site. The site used to work on CPM ads only; every time the site was viewed, Search Kindly made 4/10 of a cent. Not much, I know, but it really does add up in the long run. Well, some jackass thought it would be a great idea to create a program that constantly refreshed the page...and when I mean constantly, I'm talking like 5 times per second. And then he installed this program on several different computers.
At first Ramadev and I were thinking that it was really just some altruistic person who thought it would be a great idea to increase the pageviews and thereby increase the money that gets donated. And then we noticed an increase in this behavior AFTER we put up that little note about getting hacked, that is what leaves us to believe that it was someone who was purposefully screwing with Search Kindly. Why? I have no idea.
What we had to do next was block all the computers that were constantly hitting Search Kindly. Then we had to come up with some custom-built solution to prevent this from happening again. And lastly, we had to figure out a new way to make money, because our current ad network wasn't really thrilled with all of the fraudulent activity.
So there it is there. Please let me know if you have any advice or suggestions.
