A Little Shopping Can Make You Money
What do you get when you combine the contextual advertising of Google AdSense with an interactive shopping widget that can offer some pretty good deals to the visitors of your site. In some respects, TinyMassive.com may just look like another shopping-based ad network, but over the course of doing this review, I came to discover that it has a few unique qualities as well.
Contextual Shopping Ads
When it comes to most shopping-based advertising networks, the ads that get served are based on you selecting a particular category or defining a set of keywords. For example, if you have a blog that talks mostly about home entertainment, it wouldn’t make any sense for you to have ads trying to sell patio furniture. You might provide keywords like television, speakers, and Blu-ray.
The shopping widgets offered by TinyMassive offer this kind of utility, but it is also possible to base the content of your advertising on the dynamic content of your site or blog. It’s contextual, spidering through your website just like how Google would. This way, if you happen to be talking more about video games these days rather than home theatre equipment, the ads can automatically reflect this.
Getting Started with TinyMassive
Before we go any further, it may be worthwhile to talk a little bit about the name of this particular ad network. When I first heard it, I immediately thought of a recent technology trade show that took place in Vancouver (Mini Massive). This probably won’t be a big deal in terms of branding, but it may have been better to have a more unique name for your network. Something a little more memorable and without a myriad of possible synonyms would be good.
Anyhow, there is no approval process to get started as a publisher with TinyMassive. You don’t even need to confirm your email address (not a good thing). All you have to do is fill out a simple three-page form and you are already set up with your first shopping widget. From there, you can proceed to the dashboard.
The user control panel is very simple, granting you “at a glance” access to your current conversion rate, recent stats, and a link to your defined widgets. The trouble is that the navigation is not immediately obvious. It would have been better if there was a clear navigation toolbar or list of links somewhere. Instead, they are scattered around the page.
Building Your Widgets, Checking Your Stats
Setting up your ad widgets is a three-step process, much like the original registration process.
In the first step, you can name your widget, choose its size (728 leaderboard, 250 square, 160 skyscraper, 125 button, or 160×280), and how you would like the widget to be filled with products. The content can be contextual, based on the most popular products from the network, or based on supplied tags. It is also here that you define the URL where the widget will be displayed.
When you are done, you can click on “get code” and the panel will shift to the left. A single line of Javascript is produced. For your third and final step, copy and paste this line of code to where you would like the widget to be displayed. Here is a shopping widget installed on my fighting games blog.
The widget comes with three areas of interactivity for your visitors. There is a rating for the displayed product (thumbs up or down), a product scroller (left and right), and a price/store slider. The least expensive price is with the slider all the way to the left. I’m not entirely sure what a star means.
Stats, Referrals, and Payment
Since I’ve been running the ads for such a short while, it wouldn’t be completely fair for me to judge the monetary performance of TinyMassive. Showing you my reports wouldn’t do you much good, but I did find a sample report in the TinyMassive blog.
You’d assume that they display the realistic-to-optimistic end of the money spectrum. It could be that the network is still very young, but this report doesn’t look all that appealing. The click-thru rate is pretty good, but the average CPC is only $0.01. The referral statistics are currently integrated into the main report, but they hope to separate them out at some point.
Regarding the referral program, you earn 10% of the commissions earned by the sites that you refer to TinyMassive. Yup, you get 1/10th of a penny for every penny that your buddy earns. At least payment (via PayPal) is reasonably easy, because the net-30 payment terms only require a minimum balance of $10.
I think the shopping widgets are pretty neat and come with some cool features, but until revenue levels improve, it’s hard to recommend TinyMassive. As it stands, the network offers tiny payouts… but hopefully a massive upside in the future.
CLICK HERE TO JOIN TINYMASSIVE
- Posted in Make Money Online, Reviews
- 46 comments what's your take?
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That is really, really smart.
Evil, sorta
Reply to this comment0.01$ ppc, maybe price will rise later, looking good but we need more cash
Reply to this commentLooks like you took the widget off you blog pretty quickly Michael.
Reply to this commentIf it pays low…its not worth the time.
Reply to this commentHi Guys
Thanks for the review of TinyMassive.com. There are a few errors so I wanted to clarify. We operate a post approval process at TinyMassive.com in order to insure we know the true location of our widgets. With the pre-approval process we find it hinders the publisher and doesn’t prevent the widget immediately being moved to another location after approval. We constantly know the location of all our widgets in order to protect merchants who are paying for clicks.
You used a sample of a report posted on our blog to show how our current reporting works while we are in the process of splitting our referral data. This is a sample report containing sample data. Our widgets perform at varying levels depending on the products displayed. For example, our top performing products at the moment are anything from the manufacturer Dyson, Vitamins and the Apple iPhone. Conversion depends on the quality of the site and traffic varies of course.
We don’t use activate email as a rule because its generally used to prevent spam. Our system has been built in a way that makes it difficult to create or clone accounts using a bot. We figure our publishers are smart enough to enter a valid email address and not a fake one as its important they receive information from us regarding their account. We hate spam as much as the next person so thats not a concern for publishers.
On that note, we welcome any and all feedback in order to continue to grow and learn. Feel free to send us an email at feedback@tinymassive.com and let us know how our widgets are performing and how we can improve =)
Reply to this commentThanks for the clarification. You actually answered a few of the concerns I had after reading Michael’s review.
Best of luck with it.
Reply to this commentAnother new network. The price is not nice comparing the size.
Reply to this commentI have tried this one 2 days.
Reply to this commentVery interesting review. I might have to try this network.
Reply to this comment2 paid reviews in 2 days. Yeesh! I like the low minimum payout though.
Reply to this commentHi Guys!
Thanks for the review of TinyMassive.com. There were a couple of errors so I wanted to clarify some points.
1. We operate a post approval process because we believe that a pre-approval process doesn’t proactively prevent the relocation of widgets after approval. We constantly know where our widgets are located in order to protect our merchants who pay for clicks. A post approval process also simplifies the sign up and installation steps for publishers.
2. We don’t activate emails because this is generally used to prevent bots creating or cloning accounts. The TinyMassive sign up process has been built in a way that makes it very difficult for bots to compromise the system. Besides, its generally a fair assumption that when dealing with accounts that involve montary transactions, publishers are inclined to provide an accurate email address.
3. The graphic displayed on this review (and our own blog) contains sample data for the purpose of showing how our reports display. This was part of the blog posting updating publishers on the upcoming addition of referral reports to the dashboard.
We are constantly striving to improve and add new features. We welcome any and all feedback and love to hear - good or bad how our widgets are performing. Feel free to email me at anytime at feedback@tinymassive.com
Lauren
Reply to this commentSounds nice, I am gonna try that…
Reply to this commentOne of those “why I didn’t thought of that ideas”
Great stuff!
Reply to this commentTheir widgets are pretty impressive looking though.
Reply to this commentGeez!
First, we had the dot com boom naming convention of color+object (i.e. BlueMartini.com) and now we have the Oxymorons. What’s next? JumboShrimp.com? ArmyIntelligence.com? SpeedEndurance.com?
Reply to this commentlol
Reply to this commentAnother network to test out, eh? I’ve never had much luck with these kinds of networks because they aren’t usually relevant to my topics/blogs.
Reply to this commentSo if $.06 CPC is pretty low than what would be a good CPC average? I’m completely new to this so all this info helps. Thanks.
Reply to this commentThe 0.01 CPC certainly doesn’t look all that impressive.
Reply to this commentNot even worth the time to use up valuable ad space for $0.01.
Reply to this commentI installed these widgets on two of my blogs and they’re performing better than Shopping Ads. Its early days but I’m happy so far.
Reply to this commentMichael,
Reply to this commentgood review of this new opportunity - just might take a stab at this for my site.
I’m seeing 18-25 cents from the clicks from these widgets. My conversion seems to be better than the Chitika unit I’m running too. I think because the tinymassive widgets don’t look like an ad so people are more inclined to click around.
Reply to this comment
I’ve place the widget on my site. Thanks for the review John. Good luck with Top Affiliate Challenge. Pepperjam is good! L8R
Reply to this commentthank you john for such a useful info.thanks again.
Reply to this commentWhy would I use this site over amazon?
Reply to this commentAre you referring to amazon’s system or amazon itself?
Reply to this comment39cents for 6 clicks isn’t a good payout. That is about 15cents per click. The only way to make decent money off this thing is to do the volume that john chow does. Not many people running blogs get that kind of traffic. At least widgetbucks pays more. IMO you could earn more money off a private ad sale/month.
Reply to this commentWell, they said in a reply above that it was just a sample & it will vary for everyone.
Reply to this commentlol @ wade.. unno how u got 15 cents a click, but the real answer is 6.5 cents a click (0.39 / 6 = $0.065… dumbass
Reply to this commentHi Wade -
I apologize if I am not making this clear. The image used on this review is from a post on our blog and contains sample, as in not real data.
Thanks
Lauren - TinyMassive.com
Reply to this commentI like a business model that also offers cash back to everyone
Reply to this commentIt works like TTZ media wherein they will be serving those tech gadget and when someone clicks on them you will pad for it. 15 cents pers click isn’t a good ratio but I think that it is higher compared to thta of Adsense.
I think that I”m going to stick with my Amazon store.
Reply to this commentSounds interesting, worth a try. Not tried Amazon so wont be able to have a direct comparison.
Reply to this commentmy business partner has been running a tinymassive widget for a couple of days and has received fantastic feedback on how slick it looks from a few users. we’ve not received any money yet and reporting seems delayed by 24 hours or so but this is inevitable.
so far this out-does the chitika widget we had which looks awful in comparison. plus i like the way real people from tinymassive are contributing to blogs around the web.
i hope they succeed, and from the look of the site and the tone of their blog entries tinymassive will become friends to all serious bloggers and website advertisers.
-m
Reply to this commentPeople complaining about the cents - they already said that the report was just a sample. It will be different for everyone.
Anyway, it looks interesting. I’m going to try it.
Reply to this commentAnother $$ Opps Thanks Mr John I think i will try it
Reply to this comment$0.01 for CPC is too low but I will test it
Reply to this commentCool, I think I will give it a try !
Denise
Reply to this commenthttp:/www.dubli-network.blogspot.com
Working well for me so far. I’m displaying the 250×250 above the fold with tags apple,sneaker. The widget seems to run a little slow and I let them know that. Could be too much signup too fast who knows. But its paying well. Will be good when I can see referral data but I’m keeping it for now. Friends have commented on the look of the widget and I agree. Its definitely the nicest looking product widget out there.
Reply to this commentThat’s great that it’s going well for you.
Reply to this commentIts not really making too much money
Reply to this commentSounds like this like Affiliate Marketing meets Adsense. Too bad they are only product based. They might do well with surveys and such as well.
Reply to this comment