Is adfly worth it? This month I trialled advertising on adf.ly CPM advertising for a website I own. Here is my review of adfly:
Advertising spend: $5.
I ordered the worldwide option. After signup, payment and entering my website details I was taken to the account screen which showed the website was pending an admin check. i guess adfly do this for all sites now after spam and virus complaints from users and affiliates.
72 hours. Thats how long It said I needed to wait for the website verification check to complete according to the adfly notification. Luckily I guess they were feeling fresh and it was done in about 6 hours.
Now here’s the interesting part.
For my $5 I was to get 5,000 visitors on the worldwide package. According to the adfly traffic statistics, The website received approximately 5,300. Sweet, right? Well…not quite.
Google analytics says 950.
So $5 for 950 verifiable uniques. Oops.
So how about location? Were they prime juicy US visitors? In a word, no. Thailand, brazil, malaysia, etc. were prominent and the vast majority of visitors sent were from developing countries (viewable in google analytics).
So to sum up; approximately 1000 visitors from third world countries viewing your website for at least 5 seconds for $5.
Conclusion: I will not be using adf.ly again.
Adf.ly warning: if you do decide to use adfly; after signup and during the pending check of your website, remember to PAUSE your campaign! This way you control when it starts, else it will start as soon as the site verification is done. Which could be anytime.
Also, adfly links do need javascript and flash set to on for the linked site to unlock once the 5 seconds is up. However, some adblock software, for example noscript on firefox, can still block specific tracking scripts, like google analytics.
Edit update: here’s the raw data from google analytics for adfly worldwide from approx 950 visitors:
Brazil, 185
Vietnam, 101
Egypt, 98
Hungary, 69
Malaysia, 47
Romania, 36
Germany, 29
Chile, 26
Thailand, 26
Pakistan, 17
Bad traffic is bad!
Edit 2: it took approximately 20 minutes for adfly to send the alleged 5000 visitors. So make sure your server is ready.
Is adfly a scam? I do not believe adfly itself is a scam. However, adf.ly is a payment service and link middleman that is used by pirates on forums to earn money from linking to bad files. There are also programmers who make software to manipulate adf.ly to generate false positives so they get paid. I do not believe adfly is complicit in this action. I believe Adf.ly is not a scam, but I would not use it again.