Recently, WidgetBucks announced that they will only be entertaining US and Canadian traffic for clicks etc as they thought they are the only customers who will likely buy a product from their advertisers. At that moment it looked an end for WidgetBucks as far as the international traffic was concerned. The only alternative that was left was to geo-target your websites. Geo-Targetting would have been lot of pain for some website owners. On my side, i stopped using WidgetBucks simply because i didn’t had any website which only targeted US and Canadian citizens. But i guess all are troubles are over with the very recent development by WidgetBucks or in more general by Mpire Corporation.

Today, WidgetBucks launched it’s new International CPM ads that would be included in our widgets itself. It’s basically a CPM ads for non US/Canada traffic. Of course this is going to help publishers in a big way, specially those who have blend of traffic from many different countries. The new CPM ads will give you revenue per impressions, for the site visitors. There system will itself Geo-target the ads for you. For example, if your site visitor comes from US or Canada, the widget will display the normal pay per click program. However if the visitors are from other countries, the widget will display ads which pays per impressions. This is going to be great. I recommend you to join WidgetBucks today. The future seems bright.

By the way, just for your information. You will need to recopy your widgets code in order to make the widget work as mentioned here. Once you have the new code on your site, WidgetBucks’ system will itself take care of rest of things. Frankly, WidgetBucks is back on many of my sites. If you still haven’t signed up with them, well i recommend you to sign up instantly and enjoy the benefits. You can visit WidgetBucks here.

Sharat Jaswal, the name appears on SEOLogs. Why? Well i participated in SEOLogs $2000 MyBlogLog Contest. In past i had never been lucky with such contests. I decided that i would give it a shot. And i guess my “being not so lucky” streak finally ended. I was one of the winners and got myself a link in dnscoop directory worth $45. Not a big amount, but sometimes it really does not matter. What matters is that i won and i am glad i did. WooHooo….

Here is a screenshot from SEOLogs:

I am thinking of starting a contest as well. I do sponsor many of the contests with recent being the contest at iGuides for the month of November. I think it would be lot better if i leave sponsoring and start the contests, right here on my blog. What Say?

Mumbai, India’s financial capital, now officially ranks second in world for the highest office rentals. It stands next to the global commercial hub London. According to a recent survey by global realty consultant CB Richard Ellis, the office rental for Mumbai’s Nariman Point stands at US $189.51/sq ft/annum. That’s is very expensive for sure. But wait! If you think Mumbai is expensive then read this. London’s West End, which topped the list has the office rental currently at $328.91/sq ft/annum. Oh yeah! You can shake your heads now!

Anyways, as said by CB Richards Ellis, Mumbai also ranks third when talked about in terms of fastest growing office rentals. There was a 55 percent change in the rentals in last 12 months for Mumbai. Topping the list here was Singapore with 83 percent increase.

Anyways, if people thinking as to where does India’s capital, New Delhi stand. Well it currently ranks eighth in the most expensive office rentals list. And in the fastest growing office rentals category, New Delhi stands at 12th position. Though, surprisingly, Bangalore comes at number 6 (six), ahead of Mumbai.

Now you decide whether it is something to be proud of, or something to look out for. On one hand you can think and appreciate the great performance of economy in making Mumbai the second highest in office rentals. On the other hand you can worry thinking about the acute shortage of prime office space in Mumbai.

Anyways, the survey was done for 171 cities of the world. And only two Indian cities, i.e. Mumbai and New Delhi made it to the list of World’s top 50 most expensive office markets!

Have your say on it!!!!!

Update:

A friend of mine just informed me about another news related to Nariman Point, Mumbai. A four-bedroom flat, located at seventh floor of NCPA Apartments at the Nariman Point end of Marine Drive fetched a gravity-defying price of Rs 97,842 per square foot making the total amount a record breaking, Rs 34 crore (INR). Sources says that Kewalramani, a UK based NRI is the one who made the winning bid.

Wow! 34 Crores… for a FLAT!!!! It’s damn expensive. Guys, Be prepared for real estate boom in India.!!

Well, this has been a week with some important news and updates. I won’t go in each and every detail, but just few tits and bits.

• Google continues to play childish. It again strikes directories and paid links sites. Many inner pages of directories went down to PR0 or a gray bar. Some unlucky directories even got PR0 on their homepage. Yeah, i know how disgusting this is. But anyways, we just found one more reason to say “Goodbye Google Pagerank“.
• Larry Page, The co-founder of Google Inc has decided to tie a knot with his girlfriend next month. Larry and Lucy Southworth, his girlfriend, will get married on 8th of December’07. The location is still undisclosed. Larry is one of the world’s wealthiest man. As a matter of fact, he is the Silicon Valley’s richest bachelor with a fortune worth about $20 billion. Well, the couple will definitely be showered with all webmaster’s blessing… even from web directory owners..
• India won the Indian Oil Cup in cricket. It was a 5 match series against cricket rivals Pakistan. They clinched the series 3-2 and very convincingly. All of a sudden, Indian cricket looks promising with likes of Mahindra Singh Dhoni, Yuvraj Singh, Robin Uthappa, Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar and Gautam Gambhir. Well, i wish them more success in the future.
• Matt Hulett, WidgetBucks‘ CEO announced that traffic from outside US and Canada (which they term as “International Traffic”) is unlikely to buy from a U.S merchant website because of various obvious reasons. This resulted in dropped RPC (Rate Per Click). From now on, merchants will not pay for the clicks from International Traffic and neither will the publishers get credits for any clicks coming from the same traffic. So best way out is to implement a geo-based ad placement service to determine when to display a WidgetBucks ad widget and when to display other advertising options. This new announcement however does not effect the Ocyober and first half of November earnings, by the way.
• Wordpress 2.3 (The latest version) was a nightmare for many wordpress powered blog owners. Specially for the ones who upgraded their blog from previous wordpress versions. The new version has many new and exciting features. The built in tag option is an excellent feature. But problems came when the blog were upgraded from 2.2.x version to 2.3 version. Everything in admin panel stopped working. All one could see were bugs and lot of errors. Many wordpress plugins proved to be incompatible with this new version. Some even faced problems with the themes they were using. Well, a solution would be out soon, like probably a Wordpress 2.3.1 or something. But if you’re upgrading your blog’s wordpress version, you better be taking backups before doing so.
• From the Formula One corner, well Fernando Alonso quit McLaren couple of weeks back. The news i last heard was that his former partner, Renault, are trying hard to convince Alonso to join them, once again. Other than Renault, there are good amount of talks going on between Alonso and Red Bull as well. Fernando Alonso hasn’t decided anything yet. It’s just a matter of time. I think he will go with Renault, with whom he won the 2005 and 2006 Drivers’ titles.

On my end…well i am thinking about dropping my idea on “Google Friendly Web Directory“. My “FREE” directory lost all it’s PR and finally came down to PR0. Remember, it’s a free directory and not a paid link selling directory. The Google’s PageRank algorithms and the kiddish behavior on paid links sucks big time. So there is no point making a blah blah friendly directory.

That’s all this week. I hope the forthcoming weeks have something good in store for me…. and us!

Finally, WidgetBucks has just updated the publishers account monthly earning reports.

If you check the “My Bucks” area, you will find three kind of earnings. One would be the $25 signup bonus, which is available even now if you sign up. The second would be the earning your widget made in the month of October. Lastly, is the earning from the referrals which is 10% of what the referrals made in the month of October.

Though WidgetBucks advertising network is only five or six weeks old, i have a funny feeling, that they are gonna stay in the market for long. Not only that, WidgetBucks is gonna stay as one of the stronger advertising networks.

Frankly, i am much too amazed with my WidgetBucks earnings. They surprised me. They really are outperforming Adsense and Adbrite as for now. The referral revenue shows that my referrals are earning pretty well as well. So far, it’s more than satisfying. But are they going to stay that way forever? Only time will tell.

If you ask me right now, whether you should or should not go with WidgetBucks on your site, i would probably say yes.