Can you make money online with adfly and does it affect your Google traffic?

Review of adfly (adf.ly): The url shortening service that pays!

As I am always on the lookout for new ways to generate income from my web sites and blogs, I was intrigued with adfly (http://adf.ly/). They have a number of ways to help publishers make money from their blogs and web sites, and you can even generate revenue from content that isn't even yours.

Shorten url's

The first way to make a little money is to use their url shortening service. In a nutshell, it works pretty much like tiny url and bit.ly in that you can put in a longer web address, and it will shorten it to a more Twitter-friendly address.

Example: I recently put up a comedy spoof page about online dating. Essentially, it's just a little javascript which types in what I want, while you're typing in what you want. (I know, that doesn't make a lot of sense, but just try it and you'll see what I mean.)

So, I took the long url for that page, logged into my adfly account and shortened it. Adfly then gives me a shorter url which, when you visit it, forces you to see an ad for five seconds before you can skip it and go to the page your originally intended. Here is the

adfly url: http://adf.ly/3FolD

The actual page you are being directed to is: http://interactivelunacy.com/FindPartner2.html

Since you do not host the shortened url, the way that you generate money is to promote that address. The most common way that can be done is through your social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). However, since the final destination is a page which I do own, I'm not really comfortable with forcing people to wait five seconds to get to my page, so except for a little testing, I don't think I want to play this game. Actually, the main reason I don't want to engage in this activity is that the amount of money that you make is very small.

However, if you have a gazillion followers on Twitter or a bazillion friends on Facebook, this could generate reasonable extra money for you.




If you own websites
Adfly has two methods to make money if you own your own web site(s):

When you log into your adf.ly account you'll see a link which says: Do you run a website? Click on the link and you'll be taken to a page which will provide you with some javascript code to add in the body of your html. There are two types of ads you can insert: the first is just like the url shortening feature where, when the visitor enters your site's url, they must wait five seconds before they can skip the full page ad. The other is called Top Banner and requires that you change one line of the code so that the featured ad only appears at the top of the screen.

The Top Banner is the least obtrusive ad, and also the worst paying.

I played around with all three of these methods on about ten of my moderately trafficked pages. My traffic on the hosted pages was down, probably because most people are like me. If I get to a page which displays a full page ad that I have to wait to skip, I just hit my back button and get the hell out of there.

On one occasion the full page ad which was displayed required that I click on the advertiser's little javascript annoyance 30 times before I could actually leave the damned ad page. Not acceptable.

The oddest thing, and I don't really know if there is any connection, but as soon as I started adding adfly ads to three of my domains, my overall traffic went down big time. Like five times less traffic. And, consequently, I made a lot less money from my bread and butter Google AdSense ads.

For my purposes I don't think adf.ly is a good additon to my roster of ways to make money with my online endeavors. After using adf.ly on about eight or nine of my pages, I only generated a little over 20 cents. Not to mention (wait, I just mentioned it) that my AdSense revenue also diminished five times.

Nice try adfly, but not for me.