Spottt - Reincarnates Banner Exchange, crap!

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I discovered Spottt a few days ago, which is a new site developed by Abrite people for sites to exchange banners and traffic. Many guys, including Techcrunch have blogged about it(I think it’s a sponsored post). Spottt is pretty similar to Entrecard(yeah the same 125×125 banner exchange thing). One thing i want to say is, that Spottt is CRAP! Total CRAP and WASTE of time!

Today I’ll point out why Spottt may not succeed, can be a waste of time and might lose like BlogRush.

• You don’t know on whose site your 125×125 banner is being displayed(similar to BlogRush). No way to find out how many times it was placed on a specific site.
• No way to find out from where the clicks came from.
• Your cannot find any other advertisers or members.
• There is no way to search categories.
• Your cannot block or filter any advertisers.
• They accept your site within 1 business days, it’s too much if you want to get started ASAP.
• No way to get feedback. No forums!
• There is ZERO interaction between the members of Spottt, you don’t even know who they are! So no interaction = smaller friend network.
• It is very much similar to Entrecard. Entrecard is getting popular already(must have got several more members if TechCrunch would have posted about it).
• Every time a site with Spottt widget is refreshed, a new banner is placed and the old one goes away. But with Entrecard it’s different, your ad is shown for whole 1 day on a site you wish to advertise on. So it’s better to stick with Entrecard.
• Spottt widget must be placed above the fold, atleast in the first 845 pixels.

Anyone can fake it

Anyone can easily fake the stats because Spottt gives credits to members according to page views, so you can just run an auto-surf script and fake it.

Big sites are the BOSS!

If someone owns a site, for example, with 10,000 visits a day, it will get 5000 credits and will be able to advertise on hundreds or thousands of sites. If someone owns a site with only 100 visits or so a day then it’s not going to earn enough credits to advertise on many sites. So small sites are the ultimate losers, while the big sites profit. This sounds a lot like BlogRush and I am never going to join a site like that ever.

More Observations

A member at Entrecard did some observations with Spottt and here’s the result he/she got:

I woke up this morning to see that according to Spottt I received 230 impressions and 23 clicks. That’s a nice click through rate. And 23 clicks is about 23x what I got from Blogrush in the months I had that widget, so already it’s ahead of Blogrush.

Or is it? Checking my sitemeter, which is usually pretty good about such things, I can only find one referral that clearly came from a Spottt ad (although of course when I look at the site I don’t see my ad). In fact, I can see the referral from where the Spottt guys reviewed my ad, and then approved it. Since that time I had 24 referrals from Entrecard (which are easy to see) and 1 referral from a Spottt ad (it was a URL I didn’t recognize and when I went to it I saw it was running Spottt).

*Woof, Woof* That was a big post. So Good bye, Spottt!

Credits:

Thanks to AndroidGuys  for pointing out most of the bad things about Spottt.

Stumble it!

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How to Keep your subscribers stay tuned with sponsored posts

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Entrecard, Your Web 2.0 Card

StumbleUpon and How to drive Traffic

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