Review of TNX.Net

By Maneesh on Oct 14, 2007 in Paid Reviews

Happened to get a review request for TNX.Net earlier this request. I had earlier seen this create a decent buzz on quite a few of the other blogs that I visit. I registered myself over at TNX.Net and also spend a considerable amount of time looking through their interface and the website in general to arrive at the following observations and conclusions about TNX.Net. An initial opinion about TNX.Net though is definitely positive.
How the system works -
TNX.Net has its own separate currency for buying links and publishing them. The entire system runs on points. As an advertiser you need to purchase points from TNX (TNX is an abbreviation for Thanks btw) and then spend them on getting links on the websites of the publishers in the TNX system. Publishers on the other hand get paid in points everytime a link is purchased on their pages.

Advertisers can create campaigns based on Google Pagerank, Yahoo Backlink, as well as the geo-location of the websites where you want your links to appear on. The higher the pagerank and backlinks, the more points you will have to shell out for a link on the page (kind of obvious). TNX does provide a calculator of how many links you will get on based on the parameters you chose and the points you wish to spend.

So what about the money?
Advertisers will of course have to pay in dollars to purchase points either from TNX or from other members. The current cost for 1000 TNX points is $1.12.

Publishers can sell these points to any advertiser, member or TNX itself. So advertisers can perhaps purchase points from you at a discount rather than from TNX. You can ask your referrals or fellow members to buy points from you in case you don’t want to hold on to them for long and want to cash out.

If you choose to sell your points to TNX itself, you will be paid $0.63 per 1000 points (currently). (both for advertisers and webmasters cost per thousand points now grow by 2% every week).

Using TNX.Net:
TNX.Net has to mind one fo the simplest registration process. 1 Browine point for that. You can login to your admin as soon as you complete your registration (no need to bother about email activation).

TNX Dashboard

For Publishers -
The admin interface has a spacious and user firendly appeal to it. All the required tabs are neatly placed on the left and navigation is smooth. Being a Webmaster first, I went to check the the code for setup first up.

You can place the code on any PHP or Perl powered website (their ASP codes are still in Beta and you can test them, though they are not live yet). Though a detailed explaination on how the code needs to be integrated with your website is given, I personally feel the manner in which TNX is integrated witha website can be vastly improved. Make it less geeky to put it in a simple manner.
Publishers also get a profit estimator of sorts fromw hich one can guage the earnings based on the page rank, number of backlinks,etc. Neat.

For Advertisers -
The campaign interface is user-friendly and provides anice visual of all the parameters in place. Everything is based on selection and you don’t need to type in anything, I like it that way. You can also easily see the price rates for different parameters, $0.002 for a link on a page with PR 0 for instance. This will help advertisers make theri selections easily. Having said that, the interface is strangely confusing at the very first look, but you will settle down with it in a matter of minutes.

The second step in completing your campaign is to actually place the ads you want to show on publishers websites. You have to add at least 10 ads to a maximum of 2000 for each campaign. You can upload larger campaigns by creating a text file with each ad on a new line, or you can use the itnerface itself to add upto 10 ads.

The “ads” are of course Text Links that you want to place on various websites to create a strong list of backlinks. The entire process of creatign and submitting ads are neatly explained.

You can also check the price list for various links at http://www.tnx.net/price.php

Features:

Afiliate Program -
The ability to be viral is essential for any system these days, and TNX.net does provide a nice affiliate program. It’s not an eye popping $25 for every active referral like TLA, but it does setup a decent money making program.

I went to check on my affiliate program page even before I checked the script code section (the greed does come to fore sometimes :)). All the details about how it works is clearly given on the page. TNX.net gives 13.3 percent of all earnings of your publishers referrals, and 5% of advertiser referral spends. Check the partner’s page for a detailed overview of the same.

Points love -
You can earn upto 5000 TNX points as a bonus for signing up with them as a publisher. And as an advertiser you get 2000 points free to set up a beta ad campaign if you like. Basically you need to register with TNX and then go to this thread on Digital Point forums where you need to post your TNX ID (available from the interface) and the guys will credit the points in your system. The thread is 11 pages long as per my last count, not a bad sign.

Drawbacks:
I wanted to call this part areas of improvement, stuck to drawbacks nevertheless. Some of the things that stood out like a sore thumb on the TNX website were -

Only Self Hosted websites with PHP or Perl support can use TNX. That means three fourth of the bloggers (or maybe even more ) cannot use this system fro their blogger or typepad accounts. TNX is losing a major share of the market because of this.
No Widget to easily install it on websites. No matter how tech savvy users are everyone prefers convenience.
The small fonts on the website which is very reader un-friendly
A few spelling and gramatical mistakes, which though doesn’t have a bearing on their service, does give the whole setup an unprofessional air to it.
Lack of proper navigation to the dashboard. For all its neatness and efficiency, I couldn’t find a button which would take me back to the dashboard. Maybe I missed or am too dumb to notice, but a good interface should take care fo people like me. <edit> I figured it, one has to click on the logo.
They have a support forum. Why is it a drawback? Well for starters it didn’t load when I clicked on it. I haven’t checked it since, but it idn’t open when I wanted it, not a good face for support.

That concludes my review, did spend quite a lot of time working on it (not used to proper paid reviews you see..). TNX.Net does give a lot of positive vibes and the buzz in general has been good about it, I would suggest giving it a try especially if you have a large set of well ranked web pages in your fold. Let me know what you think of TNX as well as this review of mine, it would be of great help. Also, in case you want to, you can use my affiliate link by clicking here.

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