How Much Can You Earn Through Linkbucks and Adfly?

Linkbucks and AdFly are both services that fill a similar role, though they operate in slightly different ways. The core idea is the same; post links somewhere you control, get clicks to those links, and get paid for those clicks. It’s a low-level paid advertising scheme, not quite on par with CPC ads from Google or the like, but decent as a supplement.

I’m going to tell you right now; both of these systems rely heavily on significant volume to make any progress. The reason you see AdFly links on Minecraft mod forums far more than you see them on blogs is because they really don’t generate much income. For a teenage modder it’s enough to buy some candy on the weekend, but it’s not enough to ever be called seriously valuable. Anyone running a blog who is serious about making money is going to be using much more high profile, valuable, and higher volume ad networks.

How Linkbucks and AdFly Work

Have you ever heard the term interstitial? In generic terms, it’s a word that means “the space between objects.“

On the web, when you click a link, you’re going from point A to point B, website A to website B. You don’t have to travel down a road, where you’re exposed to billboards and other drivers; nothing like that happens. You simply leave the first page as the second page loads.

Both Linkbucks and AdFly are interstitial ad services. If you’re website A and you want to link someone to website B, what you do is run that link through either an AdFly or a Linkbucks shortener. This is a lot like a Bit.ly shortener, in that it makes the longer link shorter, but it has more than just cosmetic functionality.

When someone clicks an AdFly link or a Linkbucks link, they are not going from site A to site B. They are going from site A to site C to site B, where site C is a page that serves up an advertisement. It’s a lot like an interstitial splash page, except it shows up every time the user clicks the link.

The ads that show on the page are generally low-quality, spammy in nature, and everyone knows it. They’re casinos, they’re supplements, they’re “offers” that require credit cards, and everything your digital instincts warn you about. They’re pay per view, but the bulk of the money goes to the platform, not to you.

The way it works from the platform side is straightforward. Advertisers pay approximately $1 per 5,000 views, and AdFly adds that ad to their rotation accordingly, earning that dollar. AdFly then pays out its share to publishers from that pool.

From the publisher - that’s you - perspective, it’s pay per click. You run an AdFly link on your site and you earn somewhere between $0.001 and $0.02 per click, depending heavily on where your visitors are located. Clicks from the US or UK tend to land in the $0.01-$0.02 range, while traffic from regions with lower ad demand can earn as little as $0.001-$0.005 per click. Overall, AdFly averages out to roughly $4-$10 per 1,000 clicks across all geographies. AdFly takes their cut first, of course, because that’s how it works.

So, on your end, all you do is run your links through AdFly or Linkbucks and start to earn as people click them. You don’t have to care about, monitor, or support the ads that show up in the interstitial. They’re not on your site, they’re not part of your domain, and they don’t matter to you beyond the fact that your audience is being exposed to them.

Now, there are a few risks here. For one, if the user browsing your site has an ad blocker on, it will prevent the ads - and the code that serves them - from running. The user will just see a narrow bar at the top where they can click to proceed to the actual destination of the link. They can click through to the destination without issues, but as far as AdFly is concerned, no click happened because no view happened. That’s a click you might have recorded but AdFly doesn’t, so you don’t get paid.

This discrepancy is part of what has led a lot of people to believe that AdFly, Linkbucks, and all the other similar services are not legit. And sure, maybe they skim a few views off the top to make some extra cash, but it’s measured in fractions of pennies. It’s a rounding error to anyone who gets change from buying a candy bar in cash. If you want a clearer picture of what you’re actually earning, it helps to track the ROI of your pay per click traffic carefully over time.

The Pros and Cons of Link Advertising

Before we get into the gritty details, I’ll say one thing up front: these services are legit. They are legit in the sense that you can use them and they aren’t going to cut and run with your personal information. They will, in fact, issue payments to you if you make enough money to earn them. However, and this is a big however, the payments are so low it’s potentially not worth using.

On the plus side, both services are quick and easy to use. You can sign up with them very easily, and while you will have to plug in a lot of personal information, there’s no notable history of that information being leaked or abused.

It’s also a very trivial process to get a monetized link. You take a URL, you feed it into the tool, it gives you a shortlink, and you use that shortlink where you would have used the previous link. If you’re curious about the pros and cons of using shortened URLs in your ads, it’s worth reading up on before committing to a workflow. Everything else is done on the business end, from ad management to upkeep to tracking.

The payment threshold is pretty low - only $5 for AdFly - and they can pay via a handful of different options including PayPal and Payoneer.

AdFly also offers a referral program that pays 20% of the earnings from anyone you refer to the platform. It’s not life-changing money, but it does add a small passive layer on top of your link earnings if you’re willing to promote the service.

On the other hand, there are cons to using these systems. Oh, there are cons.

The number one con is that interstitial ads are annoying. If you want to download a file or visit a page, you certainly don’t want to have an ad thrown in your face. They’re annoying, they get in the way, they disrupt the user experience, and they bring virtually nothing to the table. They aren’t targeted ads, they’re just whatever AdFly or Linkbucks happens to want to show today.

The second con is that their tracking is imprecise to say the least. If an ad doesn’t fully load or doesn’t load properly - not to mention if it doesn’t load at all - the click won’t be tracked. You have significant attrition on your clicks, so you’re not getting paid for every one of them.

Did I mention they’re annoying? It’s even worse that a lot of spam sites will route a user through multiple ad services at a time. They might grab an AdFly link, and then run that link through Linkbucks, so that the user clicking has to see and click past a Linkbucks ad to be taken to an AdFly ad, which they have to see and click past to get to their content. I’ve seen chains like this literally a dozen ads long, and half the time you get to the other side and find the original destination removed. It’s a pain in the butt.

And, of course, they’re low paying. At the higher end - assuming US or UK traffic - you might see around $0.01-$0.02 per click. That means you could need anywhere from 50 to 1,000 clicks just to earn a single dollar depending on your traffic’s geography. To hit the $5 minimum payout, you’re looking at thousands of valid clicks in a best-case scenario, and potentially far more if your audience comes from lower-paying regions. Factor in adblock users eating into that number and the reality gets even grimmer.

Remember - that’s clicks to your links. That’s not just views of a banner on your page, or something as passive as that. If you have a 50% click rate - which is high for most industries - you’re still burning through a lot of visitors for very little return. That’s a significant amount of traffic for the kinds of sites concerned with pennies and interstitial ads. If you want to understand what counts as a good pay per click ROI, it puts these numbers into sobering perspective.

Earning More with AdFly and Linkbucks

If you want to be earning any significant amount of money online, you’re probably not going to want to use either of these services. If you do want to use them, you’re going to have to be prepared for the issues that come along with them, such as user annoyance and low click rates.

To improve your earnings, you have a handful of points of improvement.

• Number of links. Each link is an earning potential; the more links you have, the more you can earn. The $5 minimum payment is per account, not per link.
• Attractiveness of the links. More people will click a link when they’re getting something free than if they’re getting nothing but a blog post. The more attractive the content at the other end - and the more exclusive it is - the more people will click.
• Uniqueness of visitors. AdFly and Linkbucks will pay you more for unique visitors. One person clicking two links - or the same link twice - will earn you less than two people clicking one or two links.
• Volume of visitors. The more people you have, the more will click your links. All else being equal, it’s simple math.
• Geographic quality of traffic. Because earnings vary so dramatically by country - from $0.001 to $0.02 per click - the origin of your traffic matters enormously. If your audience is primarily from the US, UK, Canada, or Australia, your per-click earnings will be significantly higher than if your traffic skews toward lower-demand regions.
• Referrals. AdFly’s referral program pays 20% of referred users’ earnings. If you can point other publishers toward the platform, that passive income layer adds up over time without requiring additional clicks on your own links.

Unlike other ad networks, there’s no way to target different industries or audiences with your ads in order to get higher value links. You can’t target much of anything, really, beyond your industry in general as determined by your site and its content. A site dedicated to Minecraft mods is going to attract a certain type of user, and you can try to entice that user demographic with targeted content. The ads, though, won’t take that into consideration.

So, it can never hurt to improve the number of visitors coming to your site. This can be difficult if your goal is money, though, because one of the best ways to get more visitors is to pay for ads. However, you’re not going to be making money from buying ads for more visitors, because buying ads is going to cost more than the profit you get from your link clicks. Other than that, it’s just organic growth, which can be limited.

You can try to increase the uniqueness of visitors, but it’s not really a factor you can control directly. It’s tied to the number of visitors you get, so you simply need to get more visitors to get more unique hits.

You can try to increase the attractiveness of your links, and this is probably your greatest asset. The more users think they want what’s on the other side of the link, the more they will click it. Giving away content - like game mods, eBooks, or entries into a contest - that’s attractive to your audience is a good idea. Simple blog posts generally aren’t going to cut it.

Finally, the volume of links is probably your number one priority. That’s why sites like, again, a game mod site tend to have AdFly links; there are going to be dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of such links that people click through to get at the content. If you can build a site that supports a large database of content in that manner, you’re going to benefit greatly. If you can’t, well, you’re not going to be earning much more than a can of soda per quarter.