BuySellAds.com – This is Why You Would Not Want To Sell Ads Through them

BuySellAds.com has only been released a while ago and I already have something negative to say about them, sorry! From a buyer’s perspective I don’t see any disadvantages apart from inability to sort the marketplace inventory by price, hits or any other parameter. However, as a blogger or website owner who plans to sell banner ad slots with them, here are a few things that might stop you.

25% cut.
Open listing on the marketplace.

While they do present their cut of “only” 25% as a big gesture compared to Text-Link-Ads.com, it’s still a lot. For example, if I want to sell a banner for $50 (and I do), i.e. either I will get $37 off this price, or need to charge the advertisers $63, to cover BuySellAds.com fees. Why would I want to do either of the above if I already have enough traffic to be able to “catch” an advertiser directly…?

But okay, everyone charges fees and you can’t expect the middle man to be left at loss. This brings us to another disadvantage you might want to consider, and this is the open appearance in their marketplace. While we all remember how Google rolled out penalties against all the websites listed on Text-Link-Ads.com and PayPerPost.com, and since that date you can’t view a direct url to the seller, BuySellAds.com come and repeat the same mistake, listing each site with it’s web address, which means, if Google will decide… Uhmm.. Ok, let’s not mention the devil! Even though it’s not “links”, you can still p*ss the big ‘G’ off.

Nevertheless, looks like despite being in beta mod yet, a lot of websites jumped on this opportunity, including some well known sites like welovewp.com, psdtuts.com, nettuts.com, and cssmania.com (I just learnt that CSSmania.com has almost the same Alexa rank as TupTut.com! Yay!)

I just registered myself to see how it works, looks like they do offer a few convenient options (payment by paypal 3 times a month or monthly issued check) and the registration approval was rather fast.

Advertisers can find quite a lot of websites to choose from, ranging from $1 to $1,500 per ad, and quite a lot of sites have their slots sold and sold out, so let’s see how it will start rolling!

Be The First To Comment on “BuySellAds.com – This is Why You Would Not Want To Sell Ads Through them”

todd g says:

June 15, 2008 at 11:05 pm

Hi there, thanks for the review and thanks for signing up at BuySellAds.com. I just want to add a few points about this article

#1 – Yes, you may have enough traffic to “catch” an advertiser directly; however, chances are, we can catch more At the time of this comment it looks like you have 1 advertiser on this site, the other looks like an affiliate banner. I guarantee that if you give us a shot we will sell more spots for you than you will sell on your own.

#2 – Our homepage is outdated, the whole banner ads for SEO thing didn’t work because all of the publishers preferred to install the JavaScript code vs. the server-side SEO friendly code ;( Had they all installed the server-side SEO friendly code, it would still be OK because the links have the option to be nofollowed on an advertiser-by-advertiser basis. What’s important here is that this leaves the nofollow tag under editorial control.

#3 – BuySellAds.com is very VERY different from Text-Link-Ads, we’re selling banner ads, not text links

Please trust me, we thought this concept out in great detail before putting publishers at risk of loosing rankings in Google. Let us know if you need a hand installing the ad code, cheers!

- Todd
admin says:

June 16, 2008 at 2:09 pm

Hi Todd,

Thanks for taking the time to comment! I do hope you didn’t take my review as offensive, personal or unjust in any way, I mostly have only negative things to say so please don’t think I was just trying to devastate you or your new project. If you read my reviews of Kontera, Text-Link-Ads and even Adsense, you will see that I am always nasty, but hey, bad commercial is still a *commercial*

Regarding toptut.com, as you can see, I only decided to openly offer banner slots for sale yesterday, hence 2 banners are available but as we speak, one has been sold I know YOU guys can potentially catch more advertisers, but your chances to do so are much bigger only if one displays the “advertise here” banner, so again, buyers come from seller’s site to You. dynamicdrive doesn’t do it, hence no ads are sold for them despite having the heaviest traffic. Cssmania do have the “advertise here” banner, so they sold a few spots.

I am convinced your site will be VERY successful, you have some of the most popular blogs / sites listed already and many will follow. Naturally, I sincerely wish you good luck!!

Well… Don’t worry, when I’ll sign up to your affiliate program, I am sure I will have more positive things to say
Aidyn Bean says:

June 27, 2008 at 7:37 am

my partner would thought it’s brilliant
The Ad Mad says:

September 1, 2008 at 4:40 am

I still didn’t sell any

And I’m selling text links for the same money I sell a 125×125 banner, so I got no idea what’s wrong. Ideas?
Niyi says:

January 20, 2010 at 5:18 pm

Dear TopTut,

I think you’ve been a bit hard on Todd.

Your quote:
“Why would I want to do either of the above if I already have enough traffic to be able to “catch” an advertiser directly…”

BuySellAds does make sense for some bloggers but if you are one of those publishers that can catch advertisers directly then you really should be looking at rolling out a self-service system on your site that will allow advertisers to buy directly from you.

It is a win-win because you can still sign up with BSA and get your self-service system to automatically show their ads (or Google AdSense) if you’ve not sold any self-service ads.

Disclaimer: I’m work with a company that provides freemium self-service ad platforms.

Niyi
Trafficspaces.com