I love being able to express myself by way of posts here on JoeTech.com, but I also enjoy building (and sometimes selling) niche sites on the side for fun. When these sites get enough traffic, why not monetize them with some form of unobtrusive ads?

Recently, I found out about a site called TNX.net. The network has over 28 million pages on it, each of which can display from one to four links. They’ve only indexed a fraction of one of my sites, so I imagine the potential pages to sell on is probably closer to 50 million plus. They just launched to a U.S. market, so it takes some time to handle all the new pages, I guess. What makes this different from Adsense is that they’re putting a relatively new spin on an old model: CPM (cost per 1,000).

Here’s how it works for an Advertiser:
1. Sign up
2. Buy “tnx points” from the house or from other people.
3. Browse the directory for pages to put your link on.
4. Use points to purchase a campaign of links across the sites/pages chosen

And if you want to sell links on your pages:
1. Sign up
2. List your site/sites
3. Wait for approval of site/sites
4. Wait for pages to get indexed
5. Earn points when people buy links on your pages.
6. Sell points back to the house or to other people.

The house buys at the day’s rate per thousand points which seems to be going up about one cent every few days. It’s $0.63 today. So if you earn 10,000 points a day, that works out to around $6.30 per day.

Personally, I’ve found that the system is a bit slow in regards to getting approved, getting pages indexed, etc. After all, I have almost 250,000 pages to index and only about 5,000 were indexed in the first week. Also, only about 10% of my pages are selling links, but that’s to be expected as my pages on w3t.org vary in quality and language (it’s a URL shortener). I think that I could make up to $1,000 per month with my pages at best, but again, the better the quality of the pages, the more you’ll sell. The upside is that I seem to be selling my links faster as time goes on. I started with about 120 pages indexed and only a few links sold. When I started this article, I had (I think) about 450 links sold and after checking again, it’s up to 522 (still about 10% of my indexed pages).

The real test will be the payout. When I’ve earned a few more (thousand) points, I’ll do a payout and see that I get my money, but these guys have been around a while in other countries, which is why they’re so big already. Time will tell, as I often say, but I think this was another good find for me.

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