Viral Ad Network

One large part of a website that many publishers miss out on monetising is their error pages.

By far the most common one is the 404 “file not found” error message, which can get shown for many different reasons – removing pages from your site, or making a typo in a link for example.

Most webmasters leave these pages with their default settings, but you can actually customise them as much as you want (there are several amusing examples).

The easiest way to make extra money off this extra traffic is to place one of our content units into the page – that way you don't have to manage updating the ads that are getting shown, and you can focus attention direct onto an advertising placement.

Here is an example 404 page we've put together with one of our gadget content units in the centre of the page (Gadget content units are still in beta)

If you have our content units in your site already, then we suggest that you request a new content unit from your contact at the viral ad network, so that you can see your 404 page income separately.

How to customise your error pages:

If you're using wordpress, this page is part of your theme folder, and you can edit it in the same way you would edit another page, including using a wordpress widget to insert the unit if that is your preferred method.

If you're using Apache, or a different system behind the Apache web server, then you would create a html page somewhere on your server, and add the following line to your configuration files (either .htaccess, httpd.conf or apache.conf depending on how your server is set up):

ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/your/error-document.html

(change “/path/to/your/error-document.html” to the path to your new html file)

Tim Wintle