The Demise of Clickbank HopAds

August 30, 2012

It’s only just come to my attention that Clickbank have removed their HopAds service. If you were not familiar with it, it allowed you to create ads for Clickbank products that could be displayed on your webpages. The ads were keyword driven (you’d provide a keyword and Clickbank would serve up ads for products about that keyword). There’s very little online discussion about the demise of the service. Here’s the copy of an email Clickbank sent me (which I initially missed):

Dear ClickBank Affiliate,

You are receiving this email because you are currently using our HopAd Builder tool on one or more websites.

We are discontinuing the HopAd Builder tool in a few weeks, so we recommend that you remove any existing HopAd Builder widgets from your site as soon as possible to avoid error messages on your site.

The final decommissioning date for HopAd Builder is September 4, 2012. Any HopAd Builder widgets still running after this date will display an error message, so it?s important that you swap out those widgets as soon as possible.

Thank you for using HopAd Builder.

Regards,
ClickBank

Why the service has been withdrawn is very much an open question. Clickbank staff don’t seem to know themselves (or haven’t been told), so we can only speculate as to why the service was pulled. One idea is that the service was simply costing too much to run. There’s very little information available about the consequences of this regarding HopAds that are currently running of people’s webpages. They will stop working on September 4 (about a week away) and webmasters will need to find a suitable alternative. Here’s the message on the HopAds Builder screen (which doesn’t mention the termination date):

HopAd functionality is being retired beginning July 23, 2012. Existing HopAds will continue to function temporarily, but no new HopAds may be created.
Thank you for participating in this beta feature. We will provide a date for final decommissioning of HopAds soon. Please remove existing HopAd Builder blocks from your website as soon as possible.

It’s a shame the HopAds service was pulled as the ads served were always for products in the current Clickbank Marketplace. So if products were removed from there, ads for those products weren’t displayed in the HopAds. And, as new products were added to the Marketplace, ads for those products would appear in the HopAds.

And the HopAds service was free. All you needed to use it was a Clickbank account.

So where does that leave webmasters? Kind of high and dry really. So let’s look at some options:

CB Pro Ads – These guys can provide similar ad functionality to HopAds and they offers both a free and a paid service (for more features). The text in the ads they serve is rewritten so they talk about the products being advertised rather than using the default text that’s provided by Clickbank which sometimes talks about how great the affiliate opportunity is for the product rather than describing the product itself.

CB Pro Ads also provide ads in various formats: Widget ads, Contextual ads, Banner ads, List Image ads, Block Image ads, Slide ads, Scroll ads, Clickbank affiliate StoreFront and Clickbank Niche StoreFronts – more options than the Clickbank HopAds service offered. Contextual Ads are styles to look almost identical to Adsense ad blocks. And if you don’t have your own website, you can use their fully featured Clickbank StoreFronts to make money.

Lifetime Pro membership is $79.95 (one-time payment) and that’s a much better option than paying $49.95 annually.

You can put ad blocks anywhere you want and use as many as you want.

CB Engine – This is more of a Clickbank research tool, providing a range of statistical and other info about Clickbank products, but members can create ads that are practically identical to Clickbank’s old HopAds. They also provide a WordPress plugin called CBPress which will allow you to monetize your site with products from the Clickbank Marketplace (though the plugin does cost extra). You can buy the plugin on its own for $57 but if you buy it as part of a CB Engine membership, it only costs $30 (and membership itself is only $47).

Clickbank Pro Plugin: Again, if all you’re looking for is a WordPress plugin to add Clickbank ads to your blog, this one comes in two flavors – free and paid (the paid version provides more customization options).

Clickbank Elite – Then there’s my own Clickbank Elite desktop application (Windows only) that allows you to search Clickbank for quality products and can create Adsense-style ads for Clickbank Products. These ads however are static, which means they’ll only display ads for products that were found at the time the ads are created. So no new products will be added to ad blocks and products deleted from the Clickbank Marketplace will still appear in ad blocks. This is why I used to recommend HopAds as a better alternative for creating Click bank ads (but of course that’s gone now).

I’m not aware of any other services that can create ads for products in Clickbank’s Marketplace. The demise of the HopAds service was certainly a blow to webmasters (and we’ve had a few more of those this year thanks to the Google updates). CB Pro Ads is the only free option (with an optional Pro upgrade) whereas the other two options require a fee. But selling Clickbank products can be lucrative so the capital costs are really low when compared to the potential profits these services can bring you.