Google AdSense is the current leader in content-sensitive web-based marketing. Webmasters can place Google AdSense JavaScript code on their web pages in order to allow Google's servers to show context sensitive advertisements (Google Adwords). The left hand side of this page shows an example of a Google AdSense skyscraper displaying a text or image ad.

Google's terms and conditions are very strict such that many web publishers cannot use adsense adverts on their sites. They are either denied from joining the Google AdSense program in the first instance, or in a situation that is becoming more and more common do not wish to do business with Google. A number of publishers are also finding their Adsense accounts are being disabled for reasons that are completely beyond their control. The problem is that most of the alternatives to Google's Adsense are pretty useless. Most of the good adsense alternatives (such as doubleclick) are only interested in very large volume customers and so are not interested in the little guy with his blog who wants to earn a small income on the side. For this reason I have compiled my Top 10 alternatives to Google's Adsense that are ideal for the small time publisher. This site provides an updated list of the best website monetization programs that are available to webmasters.

If you are a advertiser then you may be interested in these best alternatives to adwords.

Has your adsense account been disabled? Then try these top 10 alternatives.

1. Chitika
2. Bidvertiser
3. Infolinks
4. Intellilinks
5. Dynamic Oxygen
6. B4PSAds.com
7. Clicksor
8. Skimlinks
9. Exit Junction
10. Kontera

Note: The descriptions are based on personal experience and do not represent any form of endorsement.

1) Chitika

Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka) is the industry's leading alternative to Google AdSense both in terms of Revenue and Size of Network (with 200,000+ active publishers worldwide). Chitika was founded in May 2003, is based in Massachusetts and is closely tied with Yahoo as witnessed by this May 2013 press release. In fact, when Yahoo shut down its Affiliate Program, they referred all publishers to Chitika.

Chitika began, not as a stand-alone advertising solution but instead as way to complement existing advertising / publishing programs through the use of additional Ad Units which were altogether different from the standard ad boxes, pop-unders etc that everybody else provided. Instead of displaying these 'industry standard' advert boxes with text and image ads that all look the same Chitika instead provided active boxes that showed targeted products from different manufacturers. If you ran a blog for example and discussed a product you might have found the Chitika box showing links for this product and competitors' products. If people purchased these products you would get paid a commission. This was referred to as affiliate marketing in the form of Premium Ad Units (eMinimalls).

Chitika has now progressed, however, into a fully-fledged advertiser service. The eMinimalls initially evolved into advertising units that would show adverts based on what people searched for to get to your site (exactly like Google AdSense). This is subtly different from the standard keyword driven advertising since it shows ads that are more relevant to the original intent of your visitors search. This greatly increases the chance that someone will click on an ad. This type of advertising is still offered by Chitika and is a good addition to a site containing traditional banner ads.

However, Chitika now goes beyond this, also offering what are termed premium ads. Chitika uses its proprietary "Click Prediction" technology to show select ads when there is a greater chance they will be clicked on. This is obviously a great way to improve your revenue.

For advertisers and media buyers, Chitika is a proven channel for targeting on-line consumers and qualified buyers. For all publishers, Chitika is an easy-to-use platform for earning daily ad revenue. If you visit a site showing Chitika's ads from a search engine then the Chitika premium ad unit kicks in showing you ads that are specific to your searching - otherwise the ad code falls-back to the page text and finds a suitable ad to display.

You can find info about their entire ad suite on the Chitika website but in short:

• Linx ad code - an in-text unit Linx ad units can be run in addition to Chitika's standard ad units and works best on sites with lots of text content. The code will scan the page, determine the words which should net the highest CPCs and underlines them. When the user mouse-s-over the word, a small, highly targeted text ad is shown.
   
• Hover ad code - a slider unit Hover ad units can also be run in addition to the other ad types. It also targets incoming search terms and in the absence of that, it targets page content. The unit is a small window that slides in the frame from the right-hand side.
   
• Mobile ad code - automatic display of ads on mobile devices At the time of writing Chitika is one of the only advertising networks in the world (aside from Google) whose standard ad code can sense that the user is on a mobile device and automatically serves a mobile ad at the bottom of the screen specific to the device screen size.

Chitika offers payment by PayPal (with a $10 minimum) or via Check (with a $50 minimum). Click here to visit Chitika's website and sign up today.

Click here to visit Chitika's website and sign up today

2) Bidvertiser

Bidvertiser is an excellent alternative to Google and offers some intriguing ad formats including what they refer to as free design. This lets you specify the look and dimensions of your text ads. While a useful feature I have not investigated how well it works but imagine that while it sounds good on paper it could result in lower priced ads being displayed. I.e. most advertisers will probably want to keep control of the layout of their ads and so turn off support for Free design ads. All the standard ad formats exist, however, and the payouts are excellent. Pop-under ads and XML feeds are also supported. Bidvertiser have also recently introduced two knew features that can boost your earnings:

• Conversion Bonus
  As far as I am aware Bidvertiser is the first affiliate marketer to offer this seemingly obvious service. As well as paying traditional CPC for each valid click Bidvertiser will now track those clicks and if they turn into valid leads will pay an additional conversion bonus to the publisher. If your site refers a number of high value leads this can lead to a substantial monthly bonus. In many cases this additional bonus can be higher than traditional CPC earnings.
   
• Revenue Generating Toolbar
  The second new feature offered by Bidvertiser is the customized revenue generating toolbar. The BidVertiser Toolbar allows you to distribute your own customized toolbar to your website visitors and then earn money when your users use the toolbar for searching. The toolbar is fully customizable allowing logos to be changed, links to your home page added, useful tools, direct program links etc.

If you want you can download an example of the toolbar using the link below to try it out.

Bidvertizer pays you either in $100.00 increments by check or $10.00 increments by PayPal. They also do not require you to complete any tax information or provide a social security number.

Maximum customizability for the layout of your ads: BidVertiser gives you a simple point-and-click tool to help you customize the layout of the ads to fit your site's look and feel, in order to retain the high quality of your website. Bidvertizer also offers the opportunity to block unwanted ads. The reports provided by Bidvertiser are adequate but not outstanding. The only real problem is that it has been reported that they can be picky with who they accept into their program and can be quick to ban users whose websites show what may be perfectly valid fluctuating visitor behaviour. Although I have not heard any recent reports so they may have relaxed this policy somewhat. Click here to visit Bidvertiser's website where you can either sign up as a publisher (show peoples ads on your site) or as an advertiser (show your ads on other sites).

As an advertiser you can get $20 in free clicks by following this link: Bidvertiser Advertise and get $20 in free clicks.

3) Infolinks

A relative newcomer to the scene Infolinks specializes in In-Text Advertizing. That is it indexes your page looking for keywords and phrases that are not currently links and converts them into advertizing links. When a user places their mouse over the link a box opens up showing the ad. If they click on the link you get paid. It is very simple and works very effectively. The nice part is that you can use Infolinks to compliment an existing advertizing campaign on your website. For example you can show banner ads with Bidvertiser and show text links with Infolinks. Or you can even show text links with both Intellilinks and Infolinks together on the same page to maximize your revenue.

Infolinks claims to be leading the industry with the most relevant in-text advertising links and the highest revenue share - guaranteed. I am not sure how they 'guarantee' this but having used them for several months I can attest that their payouts are indeed good compared to other In-Text advertizing options.

In-Text advertizing is also useful if you have a site under construction. For example, suppose you have built a list of links but have not added all the links yet. Infolinks will parse your page and convert a lot of these into links. People then think these are part of your site, click on them and you get paid. The unobtrusiveness makes it a very attractive way to monetize your site without inundating and alienating your visitors with flashing banners, pop-ups etc.

Additionally Infolinks has just added a new feature called Related Tags. Related tags allow you to increase your clicks and earnings while adding valuable informational tags within your website's content. The Infolinks algorithm will choose the best keywords for the page and display them as tags within the Related Tags cloud. Just like In text ads, when a visitor hovers over the tags, an Infolinks advertisement bubble will appear, and each click will award your account additional revenues.

New features are being added by Infolinks all the time taking them beyond the traditional highlighted link advertiser. A recent addition is called the Search Widget add-on. In Infolinks' words it will "revolutionize how you monetize your websites". This new ad banner activates when a visitor originating from a Search Engine (Google, Bing or Yahoo) arrives at your site. The Search Widget appears for those visitors only, revealing ads related to their search. This can result in very high click thru rates.

Infolinks pays you either by bank wire, Automated Clearing House (ACH) ($400 minimum), or by PayPal ($50 minimum). Intriguingly they also offer payment via a prepaid Mastercard that will be refilled with your earnings each month. This is an interesting approach to payment and may be useful for international customers without PayPal or US Dollar bank accounts. However, the fees for this prepaid card appear to be fairly steep.

Infolinks' features:

• Quick and easy setup with no changes to your website.
• Ads are tightly integrated with your content - no additional space required.
• Free sign up with no commitments or risk.
• User triggered, less intrusive advertising that won't distract from your site's content.
• Highly relevant In-Text ads for your site visitors with record high conversion rates.
• Related tags.

Click here to visit Infolink's website and signup for an account to give them a try. As with most alternatives to adsense it is free and there is no obligation.

4) Intellilinks

Intellilinks is a similar service to infolinks above but well worth trying. Intellilinks specializes in placing organic text links across an ever-growing network of websites in order to build rank and traffic for advertisers and increased revenue for publishers. Intellilinks focuses on providing cutting edge technology, while keeping the network seamless and secure to bring results to their clients and revenue to their publishers.

For publishers Intellilinks offers the following features:

• Sell text links on your website for profit in a few easy steps.
   
• Extremely simple to setup, just install a plugin for your blog.
   
• As a publisher you have total control over which links are published on your site.

Intellilinks allows you to place ads on your website using either their PHP script or their Wordpress plugin. You can have ads automatically approved or manually review them and place them yourself.

Intellilinks has no obligation and costs nothing to join or use. They split revenue 50:50 and make payments monthly by PayPal. Unlike almost every other adsense alternative Intellilinks have no minimum payout threshold. Whatever you earn during a month will be paid to you the following month via PayPal. Intellilinks also supports hosting ads on blog pages.

Click here to visit Intellilinks website and signup for an account and give them a try.

5) Dynamic Oxygen

Dynamic Oxygen are a relative newcomer to the field having really only started at the end of 2010. However, they are growing quickly and offer an excellent alternative to the traditional Adsense route. Dynamic Oxygen enables publishers of all sizes to realize their full revenue potential! One of the nice things being that they are not focused purely on the high end, very high turnover publishers but instead cater to sites of all shapes, sizes and popularity. This also includes most international sites. Unlike many ad providers that only cater for US or European traffic, DynamicOxygen supports and pays out for worldwide traffic making it ideal for non-US based publishers.

In particular they feature:

• Benefit from targeted ads with High eCPM for your ENTIRE traffic.
• Get paid for all your international traffic.
• Enjoy unique ad formats not found elsewhere, such as Interstitials, Layer Ads, Peeler Ads, Anchor Ads, and more...
• Enjoy timely payments.
• Superb Support

DynamicOxygen provide payment via PayPal, Check or Wire Transfer with $50 minimum payouts. You can sign up for a no obligation, risk free account and give DynamicOxygen a try by following this link.

6) B4PSAds.com

Granted they might not have the catchiest or easiest to remember URL but B4PSAds.com are a fairly good alternative to Google Adsense and for those of you who lost out due to the AdBrite going bust debacle B4PSAds.com might offer a reasonably good alternative there as well. B4PSAds.com are a complete advertising solution offering Pay Per Click (PPC) and Cost Per Action (CPA) to publishers and advertisers alike. It is very easy to get accepted with B4PSAds.com, they do not require a US social security number and approval is typically instantaneous after validating your email address. They support regular webpages as well as blogs and news feeds. Some of things B4PSAds offer include:

• CPA Bonuses - They pay you CPA bonuses for clicks that actually turn into actions for advertisers. This means you can earn income on both the click itself and resulting actions.
• Hands Free Operation - No longer will you have to search for the highest performing ads, nor will you have to pull ads when they run out. Every night, the B4PSAds system finds you the highest CPM yields, but then will also rotate to the next most profitable set of offers when advertisers end their campaigns or go over budget. This ultimately translates into more earning potential from your website traffic.
• Publisher Control - B4PSAds includes a full publisher control suite for you to control every aspect of your ads.
• Account Management - B4PSAds offers real time management of campaigns and provides details statistics and full accounting ledgers of historical and month to date (MTD) earnings and withdrawals.
• No Fees - There are no administration or network fees and it costs nothing to join.
• Monthly Contests - B4PSAds offers monthly cash prize contests for publishers.
• Privacy - In a move that may be critical to publishers in Europe B4PSAds does not collect or store any personal identifying information form users that visit your website. They collect only non-identifying information required for running the advertising campaigns.

Easy Payment: B4PSAds offers payment via Paypal or Direct Deposit. Minimum payout is just $50 and payment is on an extremely frequent Net 5. That is by the 5th of each month your earnings from the previous month will be reviewed and posted to your account ledger and available for withdrawal. In addition, in a feature that I believe is unique they offer the ability for high volume earners (over $1,000 per month) to withdraw a portion of their earnings early. Did you lose thousands of dollars because of AdBrite's 3 month vesting scheme. No worries here, you can withdraw your funds within just days of earning them. All withdrawls can be direct deposited by eCheck to your Bank Checking Account or via Paypal.

7) Clicksor

Clicksor is one of the current leaders of the small publisher Adsense competition. They have payouts up to a market leading 85% and unlike a number of alternatives the cost per click bid values are high enough that you can earn a decent income. They are also, in my experience, much more tolerant than Google. Their terms and conditions suggest that you should only place one copy of their code on a page but as long as you only place a single pop-up or DHTML code on a page they seem happy to let you place many context sensitive ad blocks on a single site.

Clicksor also has a big advantage over a number of the lower ranked alternatives on this site in that their ads are truly context sensitive. Thus while you can provide keywords they have technology that will also show ads targeted to the content of your site. This means your visitors are exposed to ads of the same subject as they were searching for when they reached your site and thus vastly increases the click thru ratio and thus your sites earning potential. The context sensitive nature also saves you the hassle of having to specify keywords for all of your sites and decide in advance what people might be looking for.

The online stats provided by Clicksor are not perfect but they are enough for you to keep track of the trends with your site. They also allow you to add as many sites / domains as you want under a single account. You also only need the root page of your site approved. Once this is done you can place ads on all of your sub pages.

The payment schedule with Clicksor is also much better geared to the small site owner. In any pay period in which your earnings exceed $50.00 ($20.00 with PayPal), payments are made either by check or instantly through PayPal ($20.00 minimum for PayPal). Revenue totaling less that $50 (PP $20) will rolled into the following period. The pay period is based on a 15 day schedule so you can get paid much more frequently. Clicksor also do not require a Social Security (SSN) or Individual Tax Identity Number (ITIN) to join and so while this 'technically' does not help US site owners with their tax liability it does make it much easier for non US citizens to join up and start earning revenue.

That said I have had several reports of late about Clicksor becoming more picky about who they accept and rejecting accounts. This is especially true of sites not based in the USA, Canada or the UK as well as sites not predominantly in English. I have also seen issues with their reporting of earnings, especially referrals not working properly. Thus I have moved them further down the list but I still recommend you to try them.

Advert wise Clicksor features:

Multiple formats available including text, image and animated ads.

• Text Links
• Image Ads
• Flash Ads
• Animation Ads
• Banners
• Pop unders
• Interstitial Ads (NEW)
• Dynamic (DHTML) highlighting

Click here to visit Clicksor's website and sign up for an account to try it out. There is no obligation and no fees ever. Note, once you start adding the advert code to your site it can take up to 24 hours for Clicksor to get up to speed as it were so initially you may see some ads that don't appear to be relevant. Once their contextual engine kicks in, however, the relevance quickly improves.

Ex AdBrite customers note: Clicksor is offering guaranteed account approval to anyone who had an active account with AdBrite when they went bust on Feb 1st 2013.

8) Skimlinks

Skimlinks' logo is "Unlock the cash in your content" and in this they do well. Skimlinks provides you with a highly automated way to monetize your entire content. They focus on two approaches, the first is the well known approach of monetizing phrases on your site by automatically converting them into affiliate links. The second is somewhat more unique in that Skimlinks can take regular links on your site and redirect them through their affiliate servers. A brief explanation of how this works is as follows:

1. You add normal product links to your site.
2. Your site looks normal to your readers with links showing exactly where they are going and it doesn't appear as if it is an advert.
3. Skimlinks automatically turns this link into an equivalent affiliate link when a user clicks on it by redirecting briefly through the Skimlinks servers.
4. Everytime a user clicks through a product link that Skimlinks is able to affiliate you earn a commission

The entire process is completely automated. You just add the javascript code and away you go.

Skimlinks allows you to:

• Add normal links to your content and have them automatically converted to an affiliate link on-click.
• No affiliate links to create or manage - Skimlinks does the work for you.
• No more network sign ups and approvals - you get instant access to 17,000 affiliate programs.
• Centralized reporting makes it easy to see which retailers your readers love.
• The scale of Skimlinks allows them to negotiate better commission rates for you over what you might be able to get by approaching the retailers directly.

Skimlinks has a very relaxed attitude to the type of content supported and they fully support Blogs and collation sites. Sign up for a no-obligation free account today and try it for yourself.

9) Exit Junction

Exit Junction is relatively new and, I believe, a spin off from the now defunct Revenue Pilot. While Revenue Pilot has stopped running, however, Exit Junction is going from strength to strength. Exit Junction offers a unique approach to advertising that is compatible with all the other Ad Networks included Google Adsense. The key to Exit junction is that they focus on showing ads to users as they leave your site rather than as they arrive or as they browse. This approach offers you an additional way to monetize your traffic and also capture ad revenue from those that stumble upon your site from a search engine and then immediately leave.

By adding a small piece of Exit Junction code to the header section of your site users are shown an advert as they hit the back button. For example, if a user came to your site from a Google search and then immediately hit the back button to return to that search they would be shown an Exit Junction Ad in between your page and the Google search and you get paid for this impression. The ad is directly targeted to the search term that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. Hence Exit Junction is an ideal way of complimenting your existing ad services and so increasing your sites revenue without having to switch from your current ad provider.

Exit junction also covers all countries. You get paid for all traffic exiting you site regardless of its origin.

They offer fee free payout via Check or PayPal with earnings of as little as $25 on a monthly basis.

Click here to signup with Exit Junction for a free no obligation account.

10) Kontera

Kontera works in a similar way to Infolinks above, however, they have been around for much longer. Traditionally it was hard to get accepted by Kontera but they seem to have relaxed their restrictions of late. This is especially true for website publishers and affiliate marketers that do not have high daily page impressions.

Kontera is extremely easy to use. You simply add a few lines of code to the end of your webpage and within 24 hours additionally links start showing up on your page that serve Kontera Ads. While this service does not provide you with a complete replacement for all your ads, since they do not provide banner creatives etc., it does provide an additional way to increase the revenue your site can generate. The links are context sensitive and relevant so click through ratios can be very high for well designed sites.

Some of the features offered by Kontera:

• The best payout in the business.
• Premium ads with market-leading CPC.
• Record high CTRs.
• The best relevancy and user experience.
• Works within your text - no extra space required.
• Takes only a minute to set up.

Kontera is nice because it is simply Plug and Play and it provides an additional revenue stream for your website. It does not require any additional space or layout considerations since it integrated directly with your text. In my opinion the inline text ads also look smarter than a lot of other offerings.

In May 2011 Kontera started rolling out additional features designed to maximize revenue and value for publishers. These represent extensions of what Kontera do today and are intended to deliver better revenue and value publishers. The Retargeting offering is part of Kontera's Audience Program and leverages their unique ability to understand and assess user interest via a semantic engine designed to yield greater revenues for publishers. Kontera's Retargeting presents a unique opportunity for publishers to earn additional revenues from Kontera ads that they already serve. Kontera finds interested consumers on publisher sites and qualifies their interest by leveraging their Synapse technology. When they see these users elsewhere on the web they show them relevant banners and share the revenues with the publisher where the user first expressed interest.

The value add for the publisher includes:

1) Additional revenue (approximately 10-20% more on average once the entire Audience Program is fully operational)
2) No technical requirements
3) No change to user experience
4) Ability to participate in an exciting and novel growth area in advertising

Kontera provides payment by PayPal with a $50 minimum payout.

Click here to visit Kontera's website and sign up for a no obligation publisher account.

You can find some suggestions on optimizing ad layouts here. Click here for an unofficial list of high paying keywords.. Click here for a comprehensive list of Google Adsense Alternatives. If you are a small business owner looking for cost effective alternatives to adwords then see this site. A list of the top 10 alternatives to Google Adwords is available here.