TechCrunch Sponsors
TechCrunch wouldn’t exist without advertising support, and so I want to take a moment to thank each of our four sponsors:
Text Link Ads is a great revenue generator for blogs and other websites. Like Google Adsense, Text Link Ads puts text advertisements on your site. But the monetization seems to be higher for the amount of real estate taken up - ads are a flat rate per month (not pay per click) and each ad is just one line of text. For a visual of how the ads look, see the bottom of the Mercury News home page (under “Featured Advertisers”). If you want to see how much money your site may make, check out this page. TLA will estimate your potential revenue based on ad placement and the Alexa ranking of your domain.
Userplane is a provider of communication tools for social networks. I wrote a review of Userplane almost a year ago, and things have evolved quite a bit since then. Check out the site - many of their products are free and ad supported.
First Round Capital is perhaps the best known angel fund investing in web startups today. The team includes Josh Kopelman (the founder of Half.com), Howard Morgan and Chris Fralic (former Oracle, eBay and Del.icio.us), and investments include Riya, Odeo, StumbleUpon, Browster, VideoEgg, Krugle and many others. If your startup is looking for early stage capital, you probably already know, or want to know, Josh and his team at First Round.
Riya is a photo search and facial recognition company that you will already be very familiar with if you read this blog regularly. Tell Riya who a person is in one of your photos and it will automatically recognize that person in all of your other photos and tag them appropriately. Riya is quite possibly my favorite new web company, and I was saying that long before they became a sponsor to TechCrunch. They’ve also just released a new home page with logs of interesting content from uploaded photos.
If you are interested in becoming a TechCrunch Sponsor, more information on the program is here.
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TechCrunch would exist, you just wouldn’t make any money.
Techcrunch would still make money without the ads because of all the consulting gigs you get from it. This post was just a way to drive more traffic to the advertisers. But I understand why you have ads, it is a good source of revenue. If I had a site this popular I would have done the same, but just slicker.
I’ve said many times that I don’t take consulting or advisory work.
Personally, I don’t think you need to thank advertisers. Thank your readers for providing those impressions. Its cool to have advertisers but to post a thank you is lame. They must not be getting enough clicks.
text link ads calculator is misleading. I gave me a quote for my site but when I actually submitted it for review mys ite was rejected
Jon,
What’s wrong with thanking your clients for their financial support. Parting with cash is generally considered to be a genuine compliment that you are actually providing value. The readers are already getting this value for *free.* Thanking the people make your paying the bills is not only polite but good business. As you may know, Mike consistently thanks his readers for their helpful corrections which add even more value to his site.
Thanks Allen.
And Jon, good point. Thank you to all of my readers, too.
I like the new home page of Riya, didn’t saw that before.
It looks very helpful .Lot of activities right from the front page yet the design is not bothering the eyes. Cool.
Jon,
Saying thanks to your Sponsors is lame? GOD!
For my opinion, trying to look for something bad in the good is lame..
I can confirm what scriptkidd says–Text link ads’ “link value calculator” gives a figure that is *extremely* high and way higher than what you actually make with the system.
For my site (I was accepted and people have purchased links on the site), the link calculator says I can earn $700 per link *at the minimum* when my actual earnings per link is less than $200.
Hey.
I noticed that you’re giving a real link to these sites in exchange for cash. You might want to convert these to nofollow. You can give them the traffic but this way you’re not giving them pagerank and don’t hurt their (and your) positioning in Google.
You can read this thread for more info:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog.....05874.html
Whether the Text Link Ad calculator is accurate or not doesn’t matter so much to me. I’m happy they’re serving ads that give me enough to service all the costs of keeping my blog going. I like the model for what it delivers to me. That’s value to me for the price of a wee piece of site real estate and almost no effort on my part, other than keeping the site going - which I’d do anyway.
Mike - you’ve done a phenomenal job with this blog. It’s no surprise that great advertisers would want to be a part of it.
I don’t see any problem thanking them. It’s no different than a consulting company taking its clients out for dinner. If people were paying me as much as these advertisers are paying to blog I would be sending them thank you notes daily.
Interesting, I never heard about most of those advertising programs…
That’s a great blog really one of the best I read
Mike,
Sorry to say this but Text-Link-Ads sucks, i signed up for one my site which has a decent 10000 unique visitors but these guys never got back to with my support questions , well basically the ads dont show up yet !
Joe