With the increase in online activities in the country, websites of varied tastes are blooming even though the major traffic goes to entertainment based websites. Many Nepalese blogs – personal or professional, niche-based websites or commercial are monetizing those websites, mostly via Google Adsense – the Google’s ad publishing platform. Even most of the major media houses in Nepal use Google ad in their websites. Also for reaching thousands of potential customers and users, many Nepalese websites (mostly eCommerce based) are advertising thru Google Adwords. In order to reach true Nepalese audience and cut the money going to foreign agencies in advertising, a new Nepalese website for online advertising, NepalAdz.com has just been launched.
NepalAdz.com – Nepali version of AdSense (not associated with Google in any aspect) is primarily targeted for ads in Nepal and ads for Nepal, developed by iCloud Technologies in Kathmandu. This website has option for both the publisher and advertiser – meaning from a single account one can generate revenues from publisher perspective and do advertising on the NepalAdz.com’s networks to reach the potential Nepalese customers inside the country and the abroad. This feature is completely different from Google’s adsense one- where adsense and adwords could not be combined under a personal simple account (unless you are DoubleClick account holder.)
Advertisers create advertisement for their business/product and the publishers host widget on their website/blog obtained from NepalAdz account. This way, ads created by advertisers on NepalAdz gets displayed in various publisher websites and blogs. For every referral by visitors to these website/blog, the Advertiser’s balance will be deducted by NRs 1, and the publisher will earn a commission. It is not clear how much is the share between the publisher and NepalAdz – 10% share would generate mere 10 paisa for click on each ad as stated in the FAQs page, if this is the case then publishers won’t get excited to use NepalAdz. Simply, because the minimum share from a click to any ad on adsense network would generate atleast 70p (1 cent equivalence with the rate of 70 after deduction of Google’s share) which is much higher than what is being offered by NepalAdz.
One major benefit of technology deployed by NepalAdz is that every ad has a “Like” button which when clicked gets posted to user’s facebook profile page (if logged in). Another plus point is the use of widget for displaying ads which can be changed by right and left arrows, however it would have been better if whole portion of the vertical widgetized ads would changed when clicked on arrows.
Why use NepalAdz.com –
1. local online advertising solution
2. dirt cheap advertising
3. get paid in local currently ie NRs
4. no need to pay in dollars for creating expensive adverts like in Adwords
5. best alternative to Nepalese bloggers whose adsense account has been terminated and still wants revenue out of their sites (Read: Why Adsense blocked Western Union Payment in Nepal?)
6. easy to implement and use fund in bidirectional way of advertising and publishing.
7. payment at last Friday of every month at minimum of NRs 500
8. nice referral reports (referral here means clicks or payment reports) with lots of description
9. very low starting budget for new advertising for companies
Room to improve for NepalAdz:
1. many pages with broken links (even the contact page)
2. the main website doesn’t render equally in all major browsers (we tested in IE9, FF8 and Chrome 15)
3. everything is manual (from approval of ads to payment ) – this is really not a drawback for us
4. lack of secure site ie https (no SSL certificate deployed in the website still) – this is easy for eavesdropping on the site’s transactions with account holders
5. seems like click fraud technology and auto Facebook like is still juvenile or more on this has to be done
While they are still developing local online advertising and publishing solution in our very own city, why not give them a try. We have submitted our ads, let’s see when TechSansar starts getting visitors from them, we shall cover another article to see the effect of the advertising. There are few websites like admandu.com and bigyapan.com which are allow advertise-on-the-site-only unlike the advertising on 3rd party websites and blogs that NepalAdz allows.
It is worth to visit their Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page to learn more about NepalAdz.com. Head over the sign up page, lucky members get free coupon code to start with. Let’s go local, let’s build Nepal.
