Wahoha vs Scribol

Marketing
1

I know a lot of blogs (from all sizes) have begun employing the traffic share technology like 2leep, marketgid, wahoha and scribol.

I’ve had the chance to use Wahoha and Scribol, and can give you some feedback on that.

To be honest, I started with Scribol and only went to Wahoha after assuming that their incoming click rate (from my site) was unusually low. Was my assumption correct?

Scribol (last 7 days)
Scribol reports 2176 people sent in, with 7589 people sent back to me. Scribol shows what countries the people are coming from, which is cool, and a “–” if it doesn’t know. I personally think the “–” is a made up number; and this is why. The “–” accounted for 4369 of my referrals. Google Analytics reports that I really received 3,375 visits from Scribol over the same period. Pretty much confirming that whatever “–” is, it’s not any sort of real person/traffic.

Wahoha (last 7 days)
Wahoha reports 5826 people sent in, with 11772 people sent back. Wahoha does not show the country visitors are coming from, but that’s fine since their numbers are way more accurage. Google Analytics reports that I really received 10881 visitors from Wahoha.

About an 8% discrepancy with Wahoha, who sends way more traffic, compared to a 55% discrepancy with Scribol, who sends 1/3rd the traffic as Wahoha.

So, in the end, Wahoha is the obvious better choice.

But I should point out one thing about Scribol. If you follow their advice and put their images like they want, they do site favoritism and promise higher return ratio for clicks. This does work, I saw it at the beginning, and sites can achieve 5-1 on traffic returned. Which is nice. At least on Scribol stats. I’d need to go back to Analytics and see how much of that traffic was real.

So that’s my quick review. I’ll update if I see any changes.

Good Luck, and if people wanted to post feedback on marketgid or 2leep, that would be helpful also.

Cheers
Ryan

2

Hi Cashboy, looks like your Scribol placement is pretty bad, hence why you’ve probably been getting less clicks in. The stories look more relevant at least, so I’m not sure why they’d get less clicks in, aside from the actual placement of the widget. As for the click discrepancy I can’t say. If you wanted to test that scientifically, you could swap the two around and see the results.

Out of interest, what’s the quality of the traffic like on each? How many page views per user are there and what’s the time on page? Wahoha looks pretty spammy to me, hence why I removed them from our clients’ sites

3

Hi Ryan,

Martin here from Wahoha, thanks for posting these stats, we pride ourselves on the fact that we are very transparent with webmasters/publishers. The 8% discrepancy is due to the fact that Google Analytics does not track visitors with JavaScript or cookies disabled. As a result of this we provide a daily traffic log of every single visitor sent to your site in your dashboard which provides the ability to compare this with your own traffic logs which will be nearly 100% aligned.

As always, I’m here to assist if anyone has any questions or concerns. My email address is martin@wahoha.com

@dave26 We are able to tailor content in the widget to a particular website’s needs. Incidentally I don’t see you in the list of our publishing parters, so please feel free to email me.

4

@ Martin, the issue with Wahoha is the quality of your sites. Take this for example, which is on your front page: Why body building is danger? here is the aswer ~ blog dalimunthe - this site has a pop-up, a popunder and a huge amount of widgets - it also has copyrighted content. This is by no means unique as a piece of content on your site, but at the same time poses a legal and brand risk to my content.

For now it seems sites like Scribol are safer to use and get the results. Will email them though about the Stats.

One thing I would say about Wahoha that looks good Martin is you responding directly and being transparent with all this stuff. It’s nice to see.

5

I agree! and even more! All those brutal things that are shown on Wahoha’s widgets are HORRIBLE! I can’t even imagine if my kid could see any of them. I know that Internet is full of X rated stuff but all they do is making it more available! take a look, I just opened wahoha.com and what I’ve found there:

http://wahoha.com/static/images/ci/20770-140x140.jpg
http://wahoha.com/static/images/ci/54840-140x140.jpg
http://wahoha.com/static/images/ci/53980-140x140.jpg
http://wahoha.com/static/images/ci/16266-140x140.jpg
http://wahoha.com/static/images/ci/1620-140x140.jpg

this can continue forever… Maybe next time they should make widgets from redtube or something… why not, it will be clickable, right?

my opinion is that wahoha’s widgets are simply spoiling website’s reputation and site with such widgets should be automatically limited by age (16+ or more)

and even crystal transparency can’t help this trouble…

6

Ah,

I should follow up on this debate.

Wahoha’s selection of sites is (unfortunately) horrible. They are extremely spammy. I went to one site yesterday through Wahoha that had 6 pop-ups! Six, and video ads that had no pause button.

These sites probably make a killing just from the traffic sent by wahoha since they don’t seem to care about visitors ever returning.

Wahoha, you need to check out some of your pubs. If they have more than one pop-up/under, and out of control active-x ads, you need to give them the boot. You are a big enough company to demand that from your pubs.

And, yes, Scribol’s use of admins and more diverse categories leads to more targeted thumbnails/links.

My advice to both Wahoha and Scribol, both of you should yank the pop-up from your interchange; that middle page on your domain before going to the actual other site.

I’ve talked to other big publishers about both your services (just for reference, I’ve suggested both), but they all seem held up on the pop-up that occurs on the interchange. Get rid of that pop-up (stick to the banner ads) and you might see a boost of market share. Just my opinion based on personal preference and feedback.

Either way, I can reconfirm that both your services are super legit and do send traffic. And I’m sure a lot of tweaking can yield different results.

Cheers!
Ryan

*Now we need some 2leep and marketgid admins to hop on this post. :slight_smile:

7

Hi Guys,

Chris at Scribol here. Hope you don’t mind me jumping in!

@ Cashboy As I mentioned via email… With regards to traffic coming in – it’s entirely due to the placement/sizing. Wahoha’s widget is much closer to your content – the widget size you have is larger and the bottom thumbnail is not covered by the lower toolbar on your site. The recommendations seem very relevant from our end – they’re all film/movie related, so that’s the only reason that I can think of for our inbound stats being lower. With regards to the outbound clicks, we’ve spotted a bug in your account, which we are going to fix that doesn’t add proper parameters to all your URLs. I will let you know as soon as that is done via email.

With regards to the intermediary/landing pages, this is one of the only ways that our services can guarantee a multiple of what publishers send in, otherwise we would be purely a banner exchange. The traffic we send out is significant - we’re sending tens of millions of visits to our partners on a monthly basis.

@dave 26 and hi5mark though Wahoha has its weaknesses (so do we), it is addressing those and Martin and the Wahoha team are nice guys, so it’s a pleasure to be in the same space.

Wahoha and Scribol are working with very different publishers, though there might be some overlap, generally we tend to work with different sites. 90% of those that apply to Scribol are rejected off the bat. So in a way this is an uncommon scenario.

Hope this helps and if anyone would like to reach me, you can at (chris (at) scribol (dot) com)

8

Good point on the discrepancy!

Yes, there is likely to be some discrepancy with Google Analytics just on the fact that impression/pages are only counted when loaded completely also. My analytics tag is on the farthest bottom of page, so some won’t count if the page stalls or does not have a chance to load all the way.

Cheers
Ryan