Vizu Answers Review
January 15th, 2007 by c4ck4 | 
Email This Post
Google AdSense is widely considered one of the best and most profitable ad revenue options for starting publishers such as myself. However, one should not just leave it at that and wonder why you aren’t making as much money as other blogs frequently claim. One solution, and just good advice in general is don’t keep all your eggs in the Google basket. While AdSense may be and continue to be your best ad revenue source, it can pay very well to consider five, six, or more revenue sources. Today we’ll be looking at a service that caught my eye called Vizu Answers.
Vizu Answers is interesting because unlike AdSense for example, it does not bring advertisers together with publishers. Rather, it brings market researchers together with publishers, by using polls. After you sign up, they have you set up zones where you can then describe your site and specifically the locations where the polls will be placed. The market researchers can then choose which sites they wish to place their polls on so that they are best targeted. Naturally, the researchers (ie the ones who pay Vizu Answers) get the most control, and the publishers get less input in regard to custom targeting.
Vizu uses a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) based pricing model for pricing the Poll Zones. For example, if you set a CPM rate of $1, it will cost a Client $1 for every 1000 times their Poll is displayed in this Zone. Vizu will take a percentage of the CPM rate you set.
You define a minimum CPM rate for this Zone. Polls will never be sold below this rate; however, Vizu will always try to maximize your rate and will automatically raise it to meet strong demand. If you are unsure about what price to set, Vizu recommends charging about what you earn for an individual ad unit in a similar location.
When there are no paid Polls from Clients to run in this Zone, nothing will be displayed allowing the rest of your content to slide up and take its place.
I signed up and set up a quick zone to do a test with. I chose six keywords for targeting: net, online income, monetization, blog, technology, and business, just to get started with. Then I put in a brief description and chose a quick color scheme for the poll box to help it match this site and clicked submit.On the left side you can see an awful green example of one of their polls. I gladly used their features in making my test poll match this site better than the green atrocity previous mentioned, and still pervading your view. For the time being, I’m doing a test in the sidebar to see how it works and what kind of polls I get targeted. I started the CPM at $1, but as stated in the quote, they will adjust it for me if it gets more agressive. I’m not holding my breath however as I just started this site and I doubt anybody I don’t know has even been to it yet. As of the time of this writing, you can only see a small link that says “Your Market Research Here”. Hopefully that will soon be replaced by a poll that some lucky market researcher gets to put on my site. Details will follow as they come in.