Always on the look out for interesting new ways to earn about $35.32 over the course of 12 months (Enough sarcasm about adsense) I was quite interested in the new WidgetBucks advertising system, which has been featured recently by both John Chow, and Darren Rowse.

WidgetBucks works by serving shopping related ads based upon categories chosen by yourself, or you can allow them to crawl your page and serve ads relevant to your content. You get paid on a per-click basis, the reader doesn’t even have to make a purchase, and you even get $25 just for signing up, plus the ability to earn through an affiliate scheme.

It all sounded quite good, and a similar widget I was using on one of my other blogs garnered a good number of clicks, but would only pay out on actual sales. Therefore I thought Widget Bucks could prove to be a useful alternative to make some cash, and to be fair, it still could.

There’s Always A But

But Andy Beard has looked a little further into WidgetBucks, and I’m glad he did, as there’s some issues with it that should concern you if you’re planning to run it. Do go read his article for the full story, but the element that most concerns me is the ‘hidden’ link to the WidgetBucks homepage, which is concealed within the ad code, and which effectively acts as an unpaid ‘Text-Link ad’ in each and every instance where you place the widget. Additionally, the TOS for using WidgetBucks expressly forbid you from altering the ad code, therefore preventing you from adding ‘NoFollow’ at the very least.

I’ve no problem with text links, if they’re up front and/or optional, but if you insert the ad-code in various locations, you’re looking at handing out potentially hundreds of followed links, which is no good to you at all.

These are not the only issues with WB, so check out Andy’s blog for the rest, and it just goes to show that because some ‘A-listers’ endorse or suggest something, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve checked it out fully….