I am suppose to make this post 10 days ago when I received a notice from Paypal to approve the payment sent by Mpire Corporation, the company behind Widgetbucks. I was excited but not excited enough to make a quick post because I was quite tied up with tonnes of work since 2 weeks ago. I am sorry.

Email from Paypal

Also, this payment may be the last payment I will receive from them since Widgetbucks no longer accept clicks generated from outside North America and their international CPM ad program is not impressive at all. I earned USD 0.03 from 6000+ impression.

Being curious on how other publishers fare in their CPM campaigns, I visited some forums and found that many publishers were disappointed with WB’s CPM program, with some intending to drop WB for good.

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Popularity: 42% [?]

Don’t worry US and Japan publishers as this move does not affect you. However, publishers outside US and Japan can start removing referral units promoting AdSense from your blog/website.

Google has decided to drop Adsense referrals scheme for publishers outside US and Japan with the reason that referral product has not performed as well as Google had hoped in these regions. It is a shame that Google has taken this step as Adsense referrals program is proven to be a good income generator for a lot of publishers. I am not affected as I did not participate in this program but I do feel that pain for those who spend a lot of their time promoting Adsense.

Meanwhile, users who are still eligible to participate will find their “bonuses” greatly reduced. Read more here…

About a year ago, as an experiment, we changed the pricing structure for AdSense referrals so that when a user you referred to the program earned $5 within 180 days of sign-up, you would also earn $5. When that publisher earned $100 within 180 days and removed all payment holds, you’d receive $250. We have decided to conclude this experiment and return to the original pricing structure. As a result, we’ll soon no longer be offering the $5 bonus or $2000 bonus, and the payout for referring a user who generates $100 with AdSense in the first 180 days will return to $100.

Seems that Google is getting less generous these days .. and let’s hope that they will not do something “silly” to the PPC program.

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Popularity: 39% [?]

I was visiting my blog on Jan 5th and was surprised that it redirected to another website, adbaaz.com. I did a quick check and found that as soon as my blog starting to load the Advertlets script, it triggered the redirection. Afraid it might affect my blog’s traffic and earning, I removed ALL Advertets scripts from my blog and true enough, it solves the problem.

As I was not in Malaysia that day, I do not have the luxury of time to investigate the cause of the redirection until today.

So what happened?
According to Josh Lim

A complication in the renewal process caused the Advertlets.com domain to expire, and caused issues for bloggers with our ads installed, which made their blogs redirect to a placeholder page. It was not our intent to do so. Advertlets.com blog users were unable to login to their Advertlets accounts and access the website as well.

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Popularity: 34% [?]

It has been a week since I signed up with Entrecard and thought it is nice to post a short report on them. Referring to my previous post, I mentioned that Entrecard helps to bring more traffic to your site which is very crucial for new bloggers.

So far, 101 clicks has been generated from Entrecard to my blog and I am satisfied with the result. More statistic here:-

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Popularity: 24% [?]

Wordpress has just released an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations.

Upgrade your Wordpress version now to remove these vulnerabilities.

Also, a small feature has been included along with this release which allows you to define the error message when Wordpress fails to connect to your database. Simply place  your custom template at wp-content/db-error.php.

How to upgrade? Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 31% [?]