A couple of days ago, amidst all of my other backend programming work, I provided a little assistance at TextAdMarket when things didn't work quite right. I did my initial review on May 31st ("TextAdMarket: A New Non-Contextual Advertising Service") and I've had plenty of time to evaluate the changes that have been put in place since then, as well as the overall service.

My Assistance

I was attempting to create two new ads, which are now up at the top of both sidebars, using the new color options. I sent an email message to Benjamin Schrum, the owner, when I found out that new colors wouldn't save from screen to screen.

Ben did some testing on his end, and I did some testing on my end, and we found out that the problem was limited to Firefox 3. The colors saved just fine with IE6, IE7 and Firefox 2. We didn't test on any of the other browsers, or at least I didn't.

The problem was traced to using relative versus absolute paths, a method that seems to prevent caching in Firefox 3. After a minor change in the code at the server, everything worked fine.

Out with the old. In with the new.

I replaced the stale banner at the top of the right sidebar and added one to the top of the left sidebar. The old banner made me more than $10 with only 2 advertisers, which isn't bad when you consider I wasn't really trying.

The 2 new banners have been colorized to blend in with the rest of the sidebar widgets. What do you think of my handywork? They're the same colors I use for the Google AdSense ads that regular visitors never see.

New CPC Ads

Ben worked his tail off to add CPC (cost per click) ads to the arsenal of publishing options. You have to leave the checkmark in place (which I did) while creating a banner to participate.

It's a brand new option which went into effect during the July 4th holiday weekend, so it's a little slow starting up. I'll have to watch and see if any CPC ads start appearing. The CPC ads are only supposed to appear when the CPD (cost per day) ads aren't filling up the empty spots.

Ad Serving

Ad serving is still a little slower than I'd like to see, but with the assistance of the WordPress IFrameWidgets plugin, they won't slow the rest of the page down.

I've seen a few minor instances where an error instead of the old banner ad appeared. I actually think I contributed to those errors while testing gzip options.

Evaluation

I plan to run the TextAdMarket ads for at least another month, just to see how well they do. I'll also be looking at the stats on their site to see how well they're performing. The worst that can happen is that they won't perform well on this blog. In that case, I'll just have to use them on some of my "niche" blogs instead.

Have you tested the service yet?