Empty Space Has Died! Long Live The Money Making Empty Space!
I was never a fan of mythology, but I still remember a few characters. One of them, king Midas, was rewarded by God Dionysus with the fulfillment of one wish. King Midas wished that everything he touches turns into in gold. You can imagine that it didn’t take long until he got a golden wife, a golden daughter, and nothing to eat or drink, because everything turned to gold instantly, at the very first touch.
This is pretty much my first impression when trying EmptySpaceAds, a new service for bloggers and ad networks, which turns the empty space of your blog into cash, by serving ads whenever somebody hovers the mouse over those empty spaces. Here you can see an example, in which the ad units are set up to appear on the edges of the page:
For this example I’ve chosen the small button format, which displays only one ad, but the choice of formats goes up to big rectangles or wide sky scrappers (actually, the format is not set in EmptySpaceAds, but in the network you are taking the ads from (for the moment, the only available network is Shopping Ads).
If you decide to give it a try, please be aware that you’ll have to open an account with ShoppingAds as well (it is free). After you set up your Shopping Ads ad unit, you copy the code, and instead of pasting it into your site’s code, you paste it in the special box in EmptySpaceAds, as shown below:
There are a few parameters you can play with, in order to make sure your ads don’t get obtrusive for your readers:
- Empty Space Detection: this can be done either automatic or manual. The “Let me specify” choice will require you to modify the HTML code of your website.
- Ad Behavior: you have three options here:
- Snap to margins: the ad will show on the margin which is closest to the white space you hovered
- Fixed position: the ad will show nearby the cursor current position and will remain there
- Follow mouse: the ad will show nearby the current cursor position and will follow your mouse movements on the screen
- Dismissal Behavior: you can choose between smooth fade and explode.
- Active / Inactive: this switch makes your ad to show or not. You can change this also from the generated code directly.
The Positives Of Putting Your Empty Space At Work
Well, if you don’t get greedy, EmptySpaceAds can be an excellent tool, because it offers bloggers a few advantages:
- You can offer your readers an uncluttered blog, and yet make money from it
- You can use it to promote your own products, like an e-book you’ve written (either you give it away or sell it)
- The CTR is incredibly high (I don’t know if it is OK to disclose it, but my first tests show it’s almost tenfold the AdSense CTR)
The Negatives Of Rushing Into Quick, Big Online Profits By Killing Your Empty Space
However, if you get greedy and do like king Midas, you’ll end up losing all your readers, and possibly other sources of income:
- If you choose an ad unit format which is very big, it will overlap with the text, and this will happen every time the reader moves the mouse over any white space
- If you don’t test the ads carefully, your ads will overlap the AdSense ad units you may have on the page, and this is against Google’s TOS, so you could get your AdSense account banned
- If you want to get maximum efficiency, you can make the ad units to follow the cursor when it moves. You can imagine what a click rate you’ll get, and what your readers will say
(what readers?)
As a conclusion, EmptySpaceAds offers a handy way of managing advertising on your site, but they will need to get partnerships with some more ad networks, if they really want to be successful. Not that there’s anything wrong with ShoppingAds, but they pay per click only for the USA traffic. For visitors from the rest of the world, only pay-per-action ads are shown.
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[…] everyone! Much thanks to Violeta over at EzMoneyOn.Net who just wrote a great review of our product. Here are my favorite quotes: “EmptySpaceAds can be an excellent […]
Hi folks, I’m David, the founder of emptyspaceads, and I wanted to thank Simonne and the folks at EzMoneyOn.net for such a thorough review of our product.
One quick clarification: with the “Let Me Decide” option, you can specify exactly which portions on your site the ads should appear in by simply adding the class ID “ESAemptyspace” to your markup. That way you won’t obscure any content that you worked hard to create and block those Google AdSense units (we don’t want you to get in trouble!).
While there are some great positives I’m grinning about, we want to make this product better! This article mentions that we should get other ad networks on board which I totally agree with. I encourage everyone to try out our product and then let us know how we can improve it, as we want you our publishers to be incredibly satisfied with it. As some of the first users of emptyspaceads you have the power to help shape it into something that works for you.
Hi David, thank you for stopping by, and for the clarifications. We really saw a great potential in your product, and we are going to write some more about it after testing it for a longer while.
Good luck!
thanks for the great article.. Im also starting to monetize my blog by using Project Wonderful.. Hope to sell more ad spaces soon
Manila Freelancer’s last blog post..Finding a Legitmate Home Based Career
You are welcome, Manila Freelancer. We wish you good luck.
Interesting.
Many thanks for sharing.
[…] of pop-ups, in case you use any, or at EmptySpaceAds, not to overlap with the post content. 5. Inline Ads and Links. There are to be no third party […]