MMA Ratings Financial Hurdles

A few people have asked me about if and how MMA Ratings makes money. The short answer is it doesn't, but there's some interest in the details, so I'll do my best to elaborate.

Back in June I was approached by Vince Waddell from MMA Madness and Full Force LLC about his new venture, MMA Advertising Network. It was a typical ad sharing deal, with banner sharing. So I submit a banner to the pool and ad some code to my site that displays a rotation of banners as do other sites. The banners are made up of affiliate sites like mine as well as paying advertisers.

During the beta period I helped Vince with a bunch of the logistics and he was able to implement the vast majority of the suggestions I made.

My first indication that something was amiss was when I saw the first payout breakdown and MMA Madness had the vast vast majority of the hits. Now they are a bigger site than the other affiliate sites, but double checking I saw that they were displaying four iterations of the banner code, often displaying the same banner multiple times on the same page load. Not to mention their small banners were custom sized for the MMA Madness sidebar and did not fit into conventional sidebars.

Alright, that's small potatoes. A little optimization and I was good to go. I should be able to quadruple my $2.50.

The following month my traffic doubled so I was psyched.

In the meantime an MMA business associate warned me about doing business with Vince. This was a warning I would hear multiple times in the future.

The next payout was late and upon inquiring I was told they were have some "delays." Meanwhile my traffic doubled again.

So there I was thinking I had about $60 coming, but it never did. After a long wait the next thing I heard was that Vince was not doing his job, had not collected any payment, and Full Force was going under. Meanwhile no one was informed so that we could seek other partners.

Soon after MMA Madness and MMA Advertising Network were bought by MMA World Holdings and they comped me about $4.50, which far less than I was owed, but more than they had to give me.

Meanwhile Aaron Richman, who used to work with Vince, contacted me and told me that Vince had been mismanaging things and that he was starting his own ad network, THE MMA Ad Net. I'm still in touch with Aaron and he says things are going good.

Rather than stay with either of them I choose to look elsewhere and hooked up with Sportsgenic. I got their code up at the end of October. I'm still waiting to see how that works out.

Update (1/1/2009): I mentioned that MMA Ratings has been doubling in traffic. Traffic continues to improve as you can see.