I wish they would give publishers an idea of how many ads they have sold.

I just completed an interview with Nick from Performancing – you can check it out here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/interview-with-performancing

Right now there are apparently no advertisers – or if there are any, it’s folks looking for extreme bargains caused by publishers mis-pricing their blogs.

So, if you have their code on your site, they run a “house ad” pointing back to themselves. Great for them, doesn’t help you any… and in the meantime, I’ve got valuable web real estate tied up doing nothing but giving free ads for Performancing Partners. The space they are taking now for that ad might even be affecting my Google income (just because it pushes Google further down the page).

Since all they REALLY need right now is a hit counter so that they can accurately track stats, that house ad is truly a gift from me to them.. effectively it’s free advertising for them at my expense – yes, I could potentially get referrals from it, but heck, I could get referral money from lots of things I could run in that space – I’d rather run ads there, thanks anyway.

I’m not accusing them of deliberate chicanery: I think they WANT advertisers and may even get some someday. But right now, running their code gives THEM free publicity and does nothing for me.

By the way, they “helpfully” removed me from their system and told me to remove their code after I posted the above opinion in their forum.. and then removed all traces of it from their site.. rather telling response, I think.

They don’t always update things quickly though – if you change your price, the old cpm will show for at least a while.

That’s good, in the sense that it must indicate a lot of interest, but it’s not good that their servers are struggling under the load..

$4.00 a month is ridiculously low. Even if your monthly page views really are what is showing at http://performancing.com/partners/advertisers/blogs/all when I looked (and it probably is not at all if you just put it there), you are selling your space at a .37 CPM rate.. most people make 10 – 20 times that rate with ANY kind of advertising – Google, whatever.

I think a LOT of people there have made the same mistake.. admittedly, you are a Political blog which might be seen by some as worth less than some other categories, but c’mon: 37 cents is way too low..

What happens is that they estimate monthly page views from current activity. As you’d expect, it’s going to take several hours or maybe even a couple of days for that to stabilize and be accurate.

So in the meantime, you set a price.. the cpm looks way too high because your estimated page views aren’t accurate yet. Remember that price you set is what you get for the WHOLE MONTH. So, for example, because of not knowing what your monthly pageviews really are, their tools might suggest $3.00 or less as your price – and unless you are a teeny, teeny site, you certainly want more than that!

Base your price on what you know your page views actually are. The CPM will look artificially high until they catch up, but that will adjust itself.