Since the end of October I decided to take a portion of one of my site’s real estate and give the new ad serving network WidgetBucks a chance. After a month and a half of running their ads, I will be removing the widget due to lack of considerable earnings.

Widgetbucks was an enticing program when launched it seemed to be a alternative for the publishers that did not have the volume of users for Chitika. One of my sites did not have the volume either, so I decided to give the new advertising network a trail.

Since their launch, Widgetbucks has a $25 signing bonus for new publishers. The money comes with a stipulation that you must earn another $25 through their network to cash out. I didn’t worry about making up the difference. I figured I would easily earn that in a relatively short amount of time. I have still not reached that threshold.

Also, regarding payment, your commission payment is issued 45 days after the month you reach the payment threshold of $50. That means it will be a while until you see your first check.

During the time the WidgetBucks script was running on my pages, it was seen over 27,000 times, but was only clicked on 50 times. A CTR of 0.19%, is not viable revenue source for my site.

I feel if I had a site that was exclusively consumer electronics or had a niche the ads really fit, they would have performed better. Even though, I used their “MerchSense” feature which is suppose to target to the content, it did not perform up to my expectations.

My last gripe is the widget is Flash-based and it is, very often, slow in loading and will increase your page time.

Sorry, WidgetBucks. It’s been fun. Can we still be friends? I’ll call you.