Glam ads gone from Squidoo

It seems that Glam.com ads have been removed from Squidoo lenses, and a good old 300x250 Google graphic ad is displayed instead. This might or might not have something to do with the news I mentioned in my last post about Glam lowering publisher payments (it probably does). I haven't been able to find any official news on this yet, but I'm sure Squidoo HQ will choose what's best (and most profitable) for the lensmasters.

Truth be told, I like the Google ads much better. I was willing to put up with that pink, glittery nonsense Glam sometimes put on my lenses, as long as it meant higher payouts. If Glam no longer provides profit to Squidoo, then good riddance! Google ads, for one, are much more targeted. For example, on my MMORPG lenses I see some nice ads for EVE Online and Angels Online that will surely get a lot clicks from the visitors:

As for how this will affect the revenue from the ad pool, it remains to be seen. I don't think there will be a big fall in the payment tiers though. Glam ads seemed to be like a short-lived experiment, after all.

August payout from Squidoo

I received the August payout from Squidoo to my PayPal account a few days ago. This time it was only $28.31 (compared to $77 last month). This is largely my own fault, really - I've been having health problems lately, so lenscrafting is temporarily on hold for me.

Still, this payout is for your June performance (back when I was still actively working on Squidoo), and while payouts can fluctuate depending on the position your lenses have in search engines, the popularity of the topic, the season, and many other things, this does not look like that. My lenses had done around the same in June like in the months before, even making a few Amazon sales there and there.

A possible explanation could be lower revenue from Glam ads (their business model doesn't look too good), lower revenue from AdSense for one reason or another, or perhaps new waves of cheaters which lower the payouts for everyone. This is all pure speculation of course, but cheaters at least I'd like to rant a little about.

I'm sure you have all seen lenses with content copied from Wikipedia getting unrealistic numbers of 5 star ratings for no apparent reason. Some people even resort to getting traffic from so called 'paid to click' sites which deliver thousands of visitors to your pages (the visitors, of course, don't care for any of the pages, they just one to get that 0.1c for the click they made). This is not only against Squidoo rules, but puts their partnership with AdSense into danger as well.

The worst thing is, I have in fact seen and reported a large number of people doing 'rating swaps', but they still got paid! If Squidoo doesn't do much about this, I at least hope they will reduce the impact of ratings on the lens rank to the point where it means so little, no one will even bother to 'ask' or 'swap' ratings, doing something more productive instead. Right now if you ask a few 'buddies' you can get your lens into top 1000 without much effort at all. Oh, I have no doubt the HQ have many means in place to prevent unfair 'rating swaps', but it seems they are not as sensitive as they could be - perhaps only registering the activity when you really overdo it and reach hundreds of ratings for your lenses. Ah, but enough about that. Note, I don't really believe that the cheaters are the reason the payments are lower this month - I just mean they are a big problem that absolutely must be solved. Ratings impacting lens rank so much is a big problem as well (in my opinion).

The payment screenshot can be seen below:

The Squidoo payment tiers for August were as follows:

High LR: $7.78
Medium LR: $1.32
Low LR: $0.07

Good luck and thanks for reading!