If not, basically they represent Malaysia’s version of Izea, or a middle man between advertisers and you, the blogger.

Nuffnang or Advertlets will on behalf of their community of bloggers, approach companies to do large scale, online advertising campaigns. The two companies will take a cut of the money that they charge to the advertisers (to cover their costs and profit margins) and the remainder will be distributed out to the bloggers in their network (based on performance – i.e. how many clicks or impressions the advert got on your site.).

Nuffnang

The first time I’d ever encountered the founders of Nuffnang was at a seminar organized by Joel Neoh of Youth Asia where they were part of a ‘under 30s’ speaking panel or relatively successful business people.

The 2 founders, Timothy Tiah Ewe Tiam and Cheo Ming Shen, gave a short speech about how they started, what they did and how they came up with the idea in the first place.

I remember that the 2 founders carried themselves very well, were well spoken and seemed quite humble in their accomplishments, which is something I liked about them.

Apparently, Nuffnang is the slang that Ali G uses to speak.

How They Work

The Nuffnang network now includes thousands upon thousands of bloggers, across 4 countries – Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia.

Their clients include MAS, Nike, Astro and Air Asia amongst many others.

They allow you to sign up and join their network at http://nuffnang.com.my as long as you have more than 20 unique visitors a day and after your site has been reviewed for non-permitted content.

If I’m not mistaken, they don’t allow blogs that contain pornography, MLM, drugs, firearms and other such subject matters.

Once your website has been approved, they will give you some code to place on your site (don’t worry, they’ll tell you how to add it) and as you can see in the images above, these are the locations they’d prefer you place the adverts.

Based on your profile (which you filled in upon joining the network), they will display adverts that they think will suit your audience and your blogging subjects.

For every click on the advert, you’ll get paid. For every 1000 impressions of an advert, you may also get paid – depending on how the campaign works.

Gliterrati

For bloggers who display adverts of Nuffnang exclusively, and don’t display adverts from any other Malaysian competitors (basically they mean Advertlets), then you get higher payouts for adverts, faster payouts, access to competitions and other benefits.

You can still display Google Adsense adverts and adverts from other non-Malaysian advertising resellers.

This ensures that bloggers will stick to being Nuffnang exclusive.

Where’s The Money At?

Well, just like any other form of making money online, traffic and popularity of your website counts.

Payouts for Nuffnang aren’t all that high as they have, according to their website 100,000 blogs on their community.

Whereas Google Adsense (and I’m not saying Google Adsense is all that great in Malaysia anyway) can pay up to RM0.50/ click, imagine how much they would have to pay out if all 100,000 blogs got even a single click:

· 100,000 blogs x RM0.50/click x 1 click = RM50,000 payouts to bloggers

So if you can imagine, CPC (cost per click) amounts are pretty low.

From an inside source, I’ve learned that it costs the advertiser, such as Nike, Adidas, MAS etc. about RM20,000 to run a campaign. So they can’t really afford to pay all that much to each blogger.

The real money is in advertorials.

Bloggers like Kenny Sia get asked to do lots of advertorials, which I’ve found out costs about RM2000 for one blog post.

An advertorial is basically where a company will pay you to write a blog post about a new product/ service/ brand/ promotion that they are doing and publish it on your blog.

It has to be a positive review of the product (most of the time).

But Nuffnang will only give out advertorials upon request of the advertisers, since it is quite a costly activity.

So you need to get your traffic up and yourself/ your blog more in the limelight.

All in all, Nuffnang is a good option to start with, if you run a personal blog, as the advertisements that they send out to their community are more mass-market based.

Give it a try for a while and see how it goes, experimentation is key when you’re running an online business.

Advertlets

Advertlets are the bitter, cross-town rivals (j/k) of Nuffnang and run basically the same operation.

They have a minimum requirement for the bloggers they accept into their community, which is roughly the same as Nuffnang’s. Roughly 20 unique visitors a day and you’re allowed to join the community.

The first time I met the founder, Josh Lim, he was giving a talk at a small blogger’s conference in Jaya 33, on behalf of one of their clients, Kaspersky.

Having not met him personally, I can only judge him based on how he presented to the crowd and unlike the Nuffnang guys, he seemed a bit arrogant. Although they say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, first impressions do count.

Also, things like the note you see above (taken from the ‘competitive comparison’ chart on Advertlets.com) don’t go down well with me. It seems like a smoke screen for bigger, deeper rooted problems.

Lastly, as an Internet marketer, statistics count. See the Alexa rank for both Adverlets and Nuffnang. Notice how Nuffnang has an Alexa rank of around 25,000 compared to Advertlet’s 125,725? That’s quite a large difference in terms of traffic numbers. Easily in the thousands a day.

That’s the rough run down on both Nuffnang and Adverlets. I’ve never really used both to try and make money online, as I feel it’s more targeted to personal/ lifestyle blogs rather than niche ones and you need a more mass market appeal to gain from their adverts.

Also, although I have my opinions about Advertlets and I’ve heard some bad things about then online, they may work better for you than for other people. Converesely, Nuffnang might work better for you.

Just do your research and give them a try. There’s no harm testing and then if it doesn’t work, to move on.

That’s the beauty of having online businesses, the power to choose.

In Malaysia we have Nuffnang (Nuffnang.com) and Advertlets (advertlets.com), two blog aggregators that act as a middle man between local blogs and local advertisers. For now however any maybe for the near future, I won’t be using them.

They use our sites to sell advertising space to local advertisers and fyi, some international equivilants are Foodbuzz.com, Adbrite.com (to an extent) and of course there’s Google Adsense. They are encourage us to use their services to make money from our sites. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

The main problem I have with Nuffnang and Advertlets are the way the adverts work and the amounts they pay to you. Personally I have nothing against the owners of the 2 companies, heck, if I stay in this line of business long enough, I’ll probably meet them one day.

It’s just that a) their adverts take up prime real estate on your blog, b) their rates are quite low compared to even Google Adsense (which you must admit have random rates at times) and c) their ads, as of yet, are loosely targeted at best.

Have a look at the Google ads on my site, I’m guessing you’ll have about 30%-40% adverts on making money online or something similar.

For Nuffnang/ Advertlets you’d be lucky to get an advert based on the finance or the Internet, although you may get Nike Ads, or even maybe a Heineken (will Google slap you for having an advert on alcohol on your site? You have to check) advert. But is that what your site is about?

I’m guessing more often than not it’s not and that it might adversely effect how you brand yourself.

You might as well save that space, put a nice auto responder box or a nice affiliate banner.

I’ll pick up more on this subject in a future post.

Good morrow,

-William Lee

p/s: Some people DO make money using Nuffnang or Advertlets. So don’t say I didn’t mention at least that in my post. Thx!