CheatAd !

Eventhough a little furious over the rejections of all sponsored posting site that I applied to, I decide to review my submissions to see if there is anything I did wrong.

The first one I look at is the SocialSpark, the youngest among the crowd, so supposedly to be the easiest to get in.

I submitted 2 blogs at SocialSpark : cheatad.com and singapore-restaurant.com, a food blog. Both were rejected. The funny thing is this: both are actually ranked quite high by IZEA, SocialSpark parent company, yet rejected. cheatad.com ranks 332 while singapore-restaurant.com is ranked 116.

And I would wonder, if a site ranked 116 among more than 7000 sites is rejected, how many sites do they approve? Top 100 only?

But for now, let’s put that aside first. What actually is IZEA SocialSpark RealRank?

According to IZEA website, RealRank ranks blogs according to traffic. It similar to Alexa or comScore, except that RealRank requires opt-in from blog owners and thus is supposedly more accurate among the opt-in blogs.

RealRank is the first site ranking service that focuses exclusively on measuring the traffic and influence of individual blogs throughout the blogosphere. The service is designed to help advertisers analyze the relative reach of blogs and make informed online advertising purchasing decisions in the long run. RealRank aims to replace historically unreliable influence indicators such as Google PageRank, Alexa and Comscore by providing more accurate statistical data collected directly from the source.
70% weighted towards visitors per day
20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
10% weighted towards pageviews per day

What is the problem with RealRank?
RealRank requires opt-in from blog owners by installing a javascript code in the blogs. This code is used to track your traffic statistic in a way similar with Google Analytics. Now, not every blog will come across this RealRank thing. And even less blog owner will be willing to put a tracking code to their website.

How useful is the RealRank?
As their sample size is very limited, people can use RealRank only to compare certain small subsets of blogs among the blogosphere. It might be good for measuring pageviews and visitors (even this is not too accurate, the figures is about 30% different from Google Analytics), but definitely not very useful as blog popularity measurement.

More about RealRanks:
Problogger
Big Foot Web Marketing
Courtney Turtle
Bloggerista