Site Updates, Ad Network | featured news

A couple days ago, I was checking out film blogger and columnist Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere and learned that his site was blocked by Google Chrome and Firefox because those browsers suspected his site contained malware. By that time, he had already gotten the problem fixed, but only after fretting over it for several hours during Christmas Eve.

As you could probably tell by my latest entries, I've been spending the last couple weeks finding different ways to monetize the site. Wopular has about 400k-500k unique visitors per month, according to Google Analytics. That's a decent amount of users. It's about time I stopped coding new features and started earning. There's a certain challenge with monetizing an aggregation site, but I'm not gonna talk in depth about it here. I'll save that for another article. Mainly, it's that the average user only views a couple pages, compare to several with the average content site.

In my attempt to diversify revenue on Wopular, I'm throwing in another kind of ads -- in-text advertising. These are ads you see when you hover over keywords that are double-underlined. They're great because you can use them along with display advertising, thus providing an additional source of revenue without cannibalizing your existing ad inventory. Currently, the two most popular in-text advertising networks are Kontera and Infolinks.

Like I mentioned in the Ebert article, I've been testing out ad networks on subpages of Wopular for the past couple months. I don't want to put any ads on the main channel pages until I've settled into something; also, I want to reserve those pages for premium sponsorships.