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Notice the ads on the sidebar? These are courtesy of tnx.net, a link selling service (somewhat) similar to TLA. TNX has the same process as most link brokers, you install a widget or piece of code into your website, and they sell that space on your site to advertisers as text link ads. TNX is different to other link brokers in a few ways, and one of the main reasons is the way the distribute the ads.

How TNX shows ads

The best way to see how ads are placed on your site is to see it from the advertiser’s point of view: Advertisers buy ad spots in the form of “points”. One point equals one link in a PR0 page, with higher PR costing more points. This means that having many pages, and most of them having an actual PR (more than zero), the more points you earn. The ads are semi-randomly distributed across several websites, based on PR and backlink popularity filters the advertisers use.

What’s with the points deal?

Yes this is weird. The TNX “points” that advertisers buy are are “paid” to bloggers depending on the PR of the page the ads appears on. After you have enough points you exchange them for money (paid through PayPal). For example a PR3 link will learn you about $2.3, and you can sell a maximum of 4 links per page. Having many pages with PageRank 0 or no PR at all (new pages) doesn’t pay that well since you need about 50 PR 0 pages to match the earnings of a single PageRank 1 page.

It took about a week for ads to start appearing on this site, (3 days for approval and 4 days for the ads to roll in), and TNX has already sold ads about 1/3rd of the total ad spots i specified.

Final thoughts

TNX seems like a decent alternative to TLA and similar services. The point system can take a while to get used to for people that want an install-and-forget solution, and their focus on PageRank will certainly keep some bloggers outside of their system. The way ads are randomly distributed through the network helps smaller publishers get into the link selling game. TNX also has an income calculator on their main page that you can use to get a rough number on how much links would sell for on your site.