WP Text Ads Launches Marketplace

I first wrote about WP Text Ads back on May 19th when Alex Choo emailed me about his WordPress plugin. WP Text Ads allows WordPress publishers to sell text links directly to advertisers and bypass services like Text Link Ads.

While selling your own text links and killing off the middleman sounds like a good idea, it doesn’t work that way in real life. Text Link Ads is successful not because of their TLA plugin for WordPress. They’re successful because of their marketplace of 10,000+ blogs offering text links for sale. Now WP Text Ads has launched their own marketplace.

I’d like to inform you that the Marketplace is up and running. WP Text Ads users using version 1.1 can join it. It’s free and requires no registration.

With the Marketplace, I hope that advertisers will be able to find bloggers much more easily.

The marketplace is pretty small right – there are only five blogs listed (one of them being WP Text Ads). You cannot order links from the marketplace. Instead, you visit the blog and order direct from them. The WP Text Ad marketplace is available for any publisher running the WP Text Ad plugin.

Right now, the marketplace is too small to be of any use. None of the blogs (except for WP Text Ads) listed in the marketplace have sold a single link. So while cutting out a service like Text Link Ads may sound great, 100% of zero is still zero.