Ever since AuctionAds started to perform less than favorably for me, I've been looking for an alternative. A while ago I received an email inviting me to join up to ShoppingAds beta.

If you scroll down this post you'll see an example of one of the 250 x 250 ShoppingAds adblocks in action.

First impressions are that it looks quite similar to AuctionAds in terms of the way products are displayed. The big difference is, that rather than being paid upon an action, ShoppingAds uses a pay per click system. To be honest, I've only used ShoppingAds very sparingly on this blog, but to give you an idea of their potential, they seem to be bringing in $0.26 per click.

There's a $50 minimum payout, which is a bit of a downer, but on the plus side, they payout via paypal. There's no limit to the number of ad blocks you can have on a page either. I'm only guessing, but I'd say ShoppingAds would perform best on niche sites, and there seems to be a lot of tech related products in their system.

ShoppingAds also have an affiliate program.

If a user clicks on the "Ads by ShoppingAds" link and signs up for our service, you earn 5% of all revenue generated by that user for the first 6 months.

It's not commission for life, but it's better than nothing. If you're feeling kind, sign up using my affiliate link (note: you'll need to use my invitation code to sign up. The code is "betaluck").

Whether it's better or worse than AuctionAds in the long term remains to be seen, but based on early results, the ShoppingAds Click Through Rate is atrocious. To be honest, based on my experience so far, ShoppingAds are no better than AuctionAds. In my opinion there are far stronger programs available at the moment, WidgetBucks is one example.