Ever since I started using Mark’s script for a Youtube eBay Amazon Mashup site, I’ve been meaning to do this post. I don’t have much for results, but I do have my share of thoughts. If you were a reader when I started using it, you’ll know that I modified the script to display Adsense’s Youtube video spots instead of just random Youtube spots. (You can Download that version of the YouTube eBay Amazon Mashup script)
The only true stats that I can give you are the stats on those spots. In the roughly 3 months that I’ve been running the script, I’ve managed less than 10 clicks on just over 2000 views. For those of you that are as mathematically challenged as I am, that’s a CTR% of about .42%. Not exactly a stellar performance. While I don’t track the eBay and Amazon hits from these sites, I’m fairly certain that I haven’t made any sales through those sites. Again, not exactly stellar.
In all fairness to the script, I haven’t done any sort of marketing for these sites. I have no intention of leaving them with this script and would like to develop them into sites at some point, but just haven’t had the time. I threw the script up as a “holder” that hopefully will help them get indexed easier and quicker when I do develop them. And it does work pretty well for that. They certainly haven’t attained hundreds of links in the search engines but each has somewhere between 10 and 20. That’s pretty good. Especially for what is essentially a parked domain. And it isn’t nearly as spammy as those ad scraping parking pages that you see elsewhere. I like that.
Overall, I’m happy with the script. It’s accomplished the goals I set for it. Mark did a wonderful job of making it really easy to implement, and the script itself is easy enough to understand that I was able to modify it to add the YouTube Adsense spots. If you’re looking for a “parking” spot for your unused domains, you can do much worse than the YouTube eBay Adsense mashup script.
About Shane Ede
there were no claims that the script would make any money 😉 like you allude to, it’s up to the person on what they do with it by marketing or just letting it sit.
it has made money for some and not for others. I use it on domains I buy where I buy a keyword rich domain cause I stumble on it but don’t know what to do with the domain. Instead of a basic parking page, google will index this site, give it some pr, and begin aging it, and it only takes a few seconds to upload a the script with a keyword list.
The biggest shortcoming with Mark’s script, IMO, is the template. It’s just not that optimized for getting clicks. But if you’re going to go through the effort of putting them up, you might as well slap some stats tracking code on them to see if they’re worth developing further. Never know what you might discover.
I grabbed the script and tweaked it quite a bit, as well as fitting the results into a simple, but more ad-friendly, template. I wouldn’t call them runaway successes, but the sites I’ve been putting up have generally been getting between 3% and 7% conversion, which keeps me out of smart-pricing-land with Google. Adsense is definitely the main earner, but I’ve gotten a handful of Amazon & eBay sales, and even a couple eBay new user signups. Not bad for a 10-minute site builder… 😉