Wondering if you should try in-image advertising with Luminate? Here is my review of using Luminate.com to make money on your website!
Want the just of it? I used Luminate for 30 days and with nearly 1 million image views, I made a whopping $0.11. Whew! At this rate, I’ll make the minimum Luminate payout of $25 in…19 YEARS.
I ran Luminate on a highly trafficed celebrity gossip blog, that gets several thousand unique visitors per day. I took the time to manually tag 100 of my photos, since I figured that the “product in the picture” feature would be the biggest earner on a celebrity website, and I installed the following Luminate applications:
- Annotations
- Image Overlay Ads
- Amazon MP3 Music
- Product in the Picture
- Share via E-Mail
- Share via Facebook
While Luminate looks promising with all of it’s fancy javascript and neat-o apps, I had an idea that Luminate would not be paying out much…but $0.11?! Come on. That is just ridiculous. The website that I tested Luminate on makes $XXXX with Adsense and $XXX with InfoLinks per month. Luminate is by far the weakest earner that I have ever used in an attempt to monetize the traffic my websites get.
I just got an email from Google in regards to their new “interest-based advertising” program, and it appears that Google is spying on it’s users…
“Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category.”
From what I’m reading, Google is tracking which websites you visit and using that information to classify you (and your computer) with specials interest categories.
I checked out the Google Privacy Policy and it looks like Google recently made some changes to the policy (it was last updated on 3/11/2009) in order to start collection this information about your web activity:
“…To serve ads that are relevant and tailored to your interests, we may use information about your activity on AdSense partner sites or Google services that use the DoubleClick cookie…We use cookies, web beacons or other technologies to record information about what ads your browser is shown, as well as what ads you click and other actions you take on our sites and services…”
I’ve finally made the switch from blogger (weak) to WordPress (infinitely superior)! It was actually fairly simple to make the switch since WordPress has an “import blogger blog” button, that will import all of your content from your blogger blog.
Here are my top 5 reasons why WordPress is better then Blogger’s blogging platform:
1. WordPress has hundreds of thousands of cool plugins/widgets to customize your blog in practically any way imaginable.
2. WordPress is more search engine friendly then Blogger.
3. WordPress has a vastly infinite selection when it comes to themes/skins.
4. WordPress is more user friendly.
5. All the cool kids are switching from Blogger to WordPress. There has to be a reason why that is…
So my blog has been moved to its new home (complete with new look), redirects are in place, custom tweaks are mostly done, co-op is set up, cool plug-ins have been activated and I’m back to blogging .
So, let’s use one of these cool new plugins now, shall we?
Wired Magazine is having a contest that requires you to destroy your most hated gadget and submit the photographic proof.
The funny thing is that this was brought to my attention (thanks Conner …), just as I was contemplating smashing my new Lexmark printer ala “Office Space”. At least now I have an extra excuse to destroy this POS…
Details to follow, but fireworks are legal in Puerto Rico. I might try and get this bitch airborn…
Unfortunately I havn’t had a cell phone since Friday, so if you’re trying to get in touch with me…well…I havn’t checked my email either, so call Stefan if you need me .
As I was rushing around trying to get ready to leave San Diego, my cell phone charger went missing and my cell phone was almost dead. So, since having my cell is pretty important, I rushed over to WalMart and bought an aftermarket charger for my LC CU500. Unfortunately, the stupid charger completely fried my phone! Howe lame is that? So not only can no one call me, but I can’t call anyone else because everyones phone numbers are in my fried phone that won’t turn on. Pretty lame, especially since there are no AT&T stores in Puerto Rico, so I just ordered a phone online, which should be here in the next 2 – 3 days.
I bought a gold Motorola Razr on eBay…haha. Bling, bling.
I just thought that everyone would like to know that Linksys wireless routers are crappy. Less then a year ago, the office started getting kicked off the internet more and more frequently, and the fix was to unplug and replug in the Linksys router, which would fix it for a little while. Then our computers started getting errors trying to connect to the wireless network. Then the router would kick us off the internet in 30 minute intervals. Finally we got fed up and bought a new Linksys Wireless-G Broadband router. That was less than 1 year ago and once again, the stupid new router is starting to kick us off the internet a few times a day again. What a piece of crap.
I’m going back to using the Apple Airport, which I never had a single problem with. I switched to Linksys because someone told me that they were really good routers. That someone apparently has never used an Apple product before…
(By the way, the Linksys router just kicked me off the internet again…for the 8th time today…)
I heard about RealDolls quite a few years ago, via The Howard Stern Show. Long story short, a RealDoll is the most realistic sex doll ever made. They are fully customized to the customers requests (you can pick the RealDolls features, skintone, cup size, tan lines and other things I won’t get into…) and they cost a few thousand dollars. They are so realistic, it’s scary. Here is an actual RealDoll:
Like I said before, RealDolls are old news and while I think they are creepy I can appreciate the artistry and engineering that goes into making a RealDoll. Now, HERE is what really brought out the creep factor for me…You have to see this documentary:
“Guys and Dolls” is a documentary about guys that have “real” relationships with their RealDolls. Can you say mental illness much? My favorite parts:
Davecat from Michigan: “I think, um, the part my father finds really difficult about my realtionship with Chishann (his RealDoll) is the fact that she’s not alive, that she’s not a human being. He sees it as something unnatural and strange…When she first came into my life it was just sex, sex, sex, sex, but now it’s just tapered off so that we’re just there for each other. We’re always there for each other…”
Another good part is where “Gordon” starts showing off his collection of guns (a glock, a shotgun, a semi-automatic) and a twohanded broad sword. Which wouldn’t be so bad if the guy didn’t look/sound like a complete nut job. Here’s a clip of Gordon and his RealDolls, where he rattles off the reasons why RealDolls are better then women. Basically because prostitution is illegal where he lives and they’ll impound his truck….ooookay….
The most important beauty secret used by all major celebrities? A good photoshop artist.
On the left is Redbook magazine’s cover featuring a “picture” of Faith Hill and on the right is the actual photo:
Can you spot the differences? They erased Faith’s under eye bags, airbrushed her smile lines (and entire face), thinned her left arm, add a right arm to the picture, removed her collarbone, removed the back flab that her dress is cutting into and fixed her posture.
I don’t even know why magazines even stage these elaborate photoshoots anymore. They might as well save some money and scan a celebrities drivers license photo and photoshop it onto a stock body.
I spent a good hour or so looking for some sort of widget that counts Paypal donations in real time and I FINALLY found it (so I’m posting it here, so others that are looking for the same thing can find it too!). The Paypal donation widget that I found is by Chipin.com and it’s pretty cool. The widget is super simple to set up and this is what it looks like:
Once the widget is created, it tracks donations and contributors and people that donate can leave comments as well. All in all, this Paypal donation widget is everything I was looking for and more. Cool!
I made the widget above for our CA2PR.com blog as a way for our friends and family to contribute to building our house. Check out the scoop here:
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…), just as I was contemplating smashing my new Lexmark printer ala “Office Space”. At least now I have an extra excuse to destroy this POS…
