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Cow vs Chow, Chow vs Cow…Whatever

Posted by Paul B | June 20, 2008 .

Which Blog Gives You More Bang For Your Advertising Buck

As any make money blogger will tell you the key to earning the big bucks with your blog is selling direct advertising. Be it text links, banners, stripe-ads or peel aways, the more of these you can sell direct the more money you can make. Revenue sharing doesn’t enter the mind of those that have the traffic to sell direct! So in our niche there is no shortage of blogs on which you can place an advert, I thought I’d try a couple out and see which gave the best value, namely John Cow Dot Com and John Chow Dot Com. One is cheap, the other is about as expensive as you get!

But What To Push?
Previously My Search Funds now My HomePages Friends, put simply the easiest way of making money online I’ve found to date. They pay you to use their search bar (up to $0.05 a search). You’ll probably not get rich but it’s all money in the pot. Even better they’ll pay you 3 levels down for referrals, I reckoned I’d be happy with 25 direct referrals on board. According to their earnings calculator if all my referrals did the same and with 8 searches a day I’d be making over $36000 a year from them! Anyway, it seemed a perfect fit for the “Make Money Online” niche so I went with it.

John Cow Dot Com
What started of as a parody of John Chow has turned into a successful blog in its own account. With over 3,000 RSS subscribers and an Alexa rank of under 90,000 I don’t think they have huge amounts of traffic but more than enough to justify a gamble on an advert. I decided to go with a plain text link at the right hand side of each page. The cost was $25, although I think they’ve now raised it to $30.

John Chow Dot Com
I stopped reading John’s blog for a while, too many guest bloggers. However he seems to be writing more now and I’ve enjoyed many of his posts, both on and off topic. I especially liked his video diary through China. It had nothing to do with making money but was still great blogging. John boasts over 300,000 page impressions a month from over 200,000 unique visitors. With stats like that you know there is going to be a price and with John Chow Dot Com it’s a high one. I spent $250 on a Top Stripe Ad banner rotation. My ad was shown on every page but in rotation with 9 others.

So Where’s The Better Value?
This is the key isn’t it? It’s no good spending $25 on an advert that only gets 2 clicks! In the same way having 200,000 unique visitors a month doesn’t mean that a 1/10 stripe ad can justify $250. This is how my ads got on for the month:-

John Cow - 116 visitors ($0.21 per click)
John Chow - 301 visitors ($0.83 per click)

Obviously I couldn’t track how many of those visitors signed up with My Search Funds but what I can say is that instead of my target of 25 referrals I actually gained over 120 in that period. At a raw pay-per-click level the Cow wins! It gets even more interesting when you start to look at where the visitors are from, I really wanted European/US traffic for my offer. This is how it turned out:-

John Cow - 87% from Europe/America
John Chow - 56% from Europe/America

Again this is clearly in the Cow’s favour. I can guess that a large segment of John Chow’s traffic is from Asia and in particular India and Malaysia. That’s fine if that’s what you are targeting but I wasn’t. HomePages Friends accept people from all over the world but I’ve seen from my stats that some nations are more inclined to try and cheat the system than others, a banned user isn’t going to make me any money! If this is offensive them I’m sorry but it’s just the way I’ve found it to be.

Where Would I Advertise Again?
No doubt about this, if my goal was purely a monetary ROI I’d go with John Cow every time. The lower PPC price would give me a better chance of pulling a profit from my ad spend. The better visitor demographic would also help if you were pushing affiliate deals this way.

On the other hand if I was looking for exposure then the extra eye balls that John Chow delivers probably justifies the extra spend. No doubt there will be plenty of John Chow readers signed up and promoting HomePages Friends now, not that I’ll benefit from that but if I owned the site it would have been a great move. John Chow will charge as high as he can as long as people continue to pay it, nobody can knock him for that.

For promoting My HomePages Friends my winner is John Cow, a bargain at only $25 a month.

(By the way if all my 120 referrals got their butts in gear and managed to get 120 sign ups as well and everybody did an average of 8 internet searches a day I’d make nearly 4 million dollars this year from them! I can’t believe that even more people haven’t got involved with My HomePages Friends!)

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7 Comments so far
  1. Tom - StandOutBlogger.com AUSTRALIA Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14  June 21, 2008 12:46 am

    Nice. I hadn’t heard of HomePage Friends before. So I signed up under you :D hope I can make you some money as well :D
    Tom - StandOutBlogger.com’s last blog post..Should I Enter ‘Blogging Idol’?

  2. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 3.0  June 21, 2008 8:32 am

    Cheers Tom, but don’t worry about me, get promoting it for yourself! It’s one of those few money makers out there that just works (without any hassle). :) All you need is the referrals.

  3. Shanker Bakshi INDIA Windows XP Internet Explorer 6.0  June 21, 2008 11:52 am

    The answer should be John Chow Dot Com . If it is other way round then its really surprising

  4. Melvin PHILIPPINES Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14  June 22, 2008 1:45 pm

    i have also advertised for him couple of months back and got a pretty got roi… well i guess it’s still better to advertise w/underrated blogs..

    Melvin’s last blog post..University Kid vs. The Net Fool Blogs Head To Head Premiere

  5. InterNet Age Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 3.0  June 24, 2008 11:07 pm

    on another note I did not realise that there was a blog John Cow instead of Chow. Did cow come after Chow as Chow is the one that I have read a lot about on the web. The importance I guess of registering similar, spelling mistake domains.

  6. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14  June 25, 2008 12:22 pm

    The Cow started as a mickey take of Chow but soon grew his own identity and legion of fans. The Cow blog was sold recently when Bob (the original owner) moved down under. The new owner has managed to pump out some fantastic content, it’s well worth stopping by for a look (even if I never win on their comps!)

  7. Making money online INDIA Ubuntu Linux Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3  August 14, 2008 6:25 am

    My choice will be JohnCow and not JohnCrow

    Making money online’s last blog post..Where to buy a car online!