Today is the grand opening of Auction Ads (aff). AuctionAds displays live eBay auctions to visitors based on the website owner’s keyword preference and pays out on a CPA (cost per action) basis. The new network is the work of ShoeMoney and MediaWhiz (the owners of Text Link Ads (aff) and ReviewMe(aff)).

Leveraging eBay’s Affiliate Model

In a nutshell, AuctionAds is one big eBay affiliate. eBay does their affiliate payout based on volume - the higher the volume, the higher the revenue share. The exact payouts are shown below.

Now, the chance of a single small publisher signing up 3,000+ new eBay accounts or doing over $1 million a month in revenue is slim to none and slim left town. Therefore, most eBay affiliates receive the minimum affiliate payout ($12 per sign up and 40% to 50% of revenue).

What AuctionAds does is put all their publishers into one big “collective” to go after the higher revenue share. By ourselves, it’ll be hard to get the top tier payouts because we can’t generate that kind of volume ($1 million a month? Are you kidding me?), However, as part of a collective of AuctionAds publishers, it could be doable. Publishers can leverage AuctionAds’ creative delivery of eBay’s auctions and AuctionAds’ ability to achieve the higher performance incentive tiers with the aggregate volume of traffic to make more money than they could with their own eBay affiliate relationship.

How Does AuctionAds Make Money

AuctionAds will not make any money off their affiliates at the start of this program. Right now, affiliates will get 100% of any money they make from the system. As the collective moves up the eBay revenue share tiers, AuctionAds will start to take a cut of revenues. The goal is for you to make more with AuctionAds than directly with eBay’s affiliate program, which will be the case as the network increases its volume.

In order to build their network as fast as possible, AuctionAds has no minimum entrance requirements - anyone is welcome to join. The bigger the network gets, the more volume it can generate, and the faster it moves up the eBay payout tiers. If the network doesn’t grow, then AuctionAds will never make any money since they’ll be paying out 100% all the time.

The AuctionAds Ads

The AuctionAds backend features an intuitive, easy to use system for showing targeted eBay auction listings on a publisher’s websites. The system features 11 different size banners with adjustable background, border, heading, description and link colors. You can also add custom campaign to track different parts of your site. To create a banner, just enter some keywords that best match the target of your readership, adjust the colors and hit the Create button. A preview of the banner will be shown.

The ads are triggered by the keywords that you enter. Because it is not contextual, AuctionAds can be used alongside Google AdSense. You just have to makes sure the two ads don’t look the same or you may run afoul of Google’s new “look and feel” rule.

Publishers also have the advantage of a referral system built into the ads. There is no need to sign up separately for the AuctionAds affiliate program because their affiliate program is built right into the ads you display. If a user clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds” that is displayed with each ad and signs up for the service, you earn a bonus 2% of all revenue generated by that user for 6 months. Not a huge amount, but every little bit helps.

Who Should Use AuctionAds

Because the ads are mostly product related, AuctionAds will work best on shopping or product review sites like The TechZone. However, the service maybe used for non-product sites and blogs. eBay sells enough stuff that you should be able to find something that will match your site.

Because AuctionAds is CPA based, it will require more tweaking than CPC or CPM advertising. A publisher should stick with it for at least a month or two to give it a fair chance. I will be running AuctionAds as a Google default. I want to run them as a main banner but simply don’t have the free ad space right now. I am going to be running them on The TechZone as well.

Sign up for AuctionAds (aff)

*Update - Right after I wrote this article, AuctionAds sent me a ReviewMe (aff) request to review their service. Thanks guys! I was writing about you anyway. Now I get a bonus. *Evil strikes again*