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 ones (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.
AdBrite,
is currently one of the best alternatives there is to
Google's adsense. While they do not offer the same large
selection of ad formats
that Clicksor and Google Adsense provide you they do offer the most commonly used ones.
In addition they offer inline page links with have some
great click through ratios as well as interstitial full page
ads which offer an excellent way to monetize all traffic to
your site not just traffic that clicks on your ads. Their
payouts are also very competitive. They
have more relaxed terms and conditions than Adsense and are
much more accepting of smaller publishers including
bloggers.
If you're a publisher, use
AdBrite to set your own ad rates, and approve or
reject every ad that's purchased for your site or just have AdBrite auto accept
ever ad. AdBrite enables you to instantly
sell ads to your visitors via a "Your Ad Here" link, in addition to selling
through AdBrite's marketplace and sales team.
Revenue is typically split 75/25 in your favor. Through a small snippet of HTML
placed on your site, they handle serving, scheduling, billing, customer service,
and sales. About half of AdBrite's sales are generated from the marketplace and
sales team, while the other half are generated from users clicking "Your Ad
Here" on your website.
While
AdBrite can provide publishers with more revenue and better ads than
traditional ad networks such as Google AdSense, they work fine along-side them as
a way for you to generate additional ad revenue by selling ads directly to your
visitors -- something the other ad systems don't do. Ad Brite also lets
you select your own minimum bid prices and give you the option of showing an
alternative ad service such as Clicksor when bid prices fall below your minimum.
If you're using
AdBrite
on your website you also have the option to turn off AdBrite's "run-of-network ads" and AdBrite will only display ads that have been
approved by you allowing you to prevent competitors ads being shown on your site. If you have no ads running, AdBrite will display nothing but
"Your Ad Here" or your alternative ad provider.
Note, from my experiences it can take a
day or so from when you signup with AdBrite and put their
code on your website to actually start seeing relevant ads
showing up. So if you see the message "Advertize on this
site" just be patient and give it a day or so and you should
start seeing relevant ads showing up.
Bidvertiser can be a useful alternative to
Google and offer 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.
Bidvertizer pays you either in $25.00 increments by
check or $10.00 increments by PayPal.
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
AdBrite or
Bidvertiser and show text links with
Infolinks. Or you can even show text links with both
AdBrite 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.
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
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.
Chitika - The Leader in Impulse Merchandising Chitika (pronounced
CHIH-tih-ka) was founded in 2003 and is the industry's leading impulse merchandising
company. Chitika was founded in May 2003 and is based in
Massachusetts. Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka) helps web
publishers generate revenue using innovative publisher-side
advertising and merchandising solutions and services.
Chitika
began, not as a stand alone advertising solution
but instead as way to compliment 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 impulse marketing in the form of
Premium Ad Units (eMinimalls).
Chitika
has now progressed, however, into a fully fledged advertizer
service. The eMinimalls initially evolved into advertizing
units that would show adverts based on what people searched
for to get to your site. 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. For example you could use it to compliment
another advertizers service. E.g.
you could show Clicksor context sensitive ads on
your site and then compliment these with
Chitika's
search traffic oriented ads.
However, Chitika now goes beyond this, also
offering what are termed premium ads.
Chitika uses it custom "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 you can have it show an alternative ad provider,
such as adsense, or you can just have it collapse away to
show nothing.
Chitika's
search based advert units allow you to display targeted products
based on what people searched for to get to your page and you get paid
for clicks. Chitika offers payment by PayPal (with a $10
minimum) or via Check (with a $50 minimum).
Clicksor is
one of the current leaders of the small publisher Adsense competition. They have payouts upto 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 tollerant
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.
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.
AdToll pays on a CPC basis. Their user interface is
great and navigating through the user panel is both easy and
pleasant. Payments are available via Cheque,
Paypal,
ePassporte and Wire/Bank Transfer. It is also possible to
use the revenue you earn as a publisher to advertise your
website further. Such integration is something that is
entirely missing from Google's adsense-adwords.
The newest technology by
AdToll is a Peel Away Ad technology that shows a peel on
the top right hand side of a web site. When the mouse moves
over the peel it opens smoothly to reveal the advert within.
This new ad format allows you to make use of the lesser
used, yet highly visible top corners of web sites. It is
very non intrusive to the site visitor. Since it uses a
small amount of space, it is efficient use of web site real
estate. An additional plus is that such a new advertising
format always draws curious clicks for visitors.
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.
Yahoo are currently playing catch up to
Google and are trying to release their own context sensitive
advertising service. This promises to be an excellent
alternative to Google Adsense but in reality is likely to be
a simple copy with the same restrictive terms and conditions
as Google, including $100 minimums on payouts. The system
seems to have been in beta test for several years now,
perhaps explaining why Yahoo as a company is suffering.
Unfortunately while you can visit
their site and sign up to register for an account don't
expect to actually hear back from them. They are either
extremely selective or are simply not accepting new
publishers and advertisers, either way they won't even
bother to get back to you to let you know this and most applicants won't even receive a reply
saying their application has been rejected. Thus until
it goes live and it becomes clear what type of website
owners Yahoo will be targeting I cannot place it any higher in
this list.
Advert wise Yahoo Publisher Network will
feature:
Display ads related to the
content on your site. You'll earn revenue from
qualified clicks.
Integrate other Yahoo!
services into your web site, including Add to My Yahoo!
(RSS), Y!Q and much more to come...
This beta program is just the
beginning. Our mission is to deliver products and
services based on the needs of the publishing community.
Targetpoint's services are particularly publisher-oriented,
you have
absolute control over the appearance of your ads. They provide supervision over ad content.
The payouts tend to be reasonable but they can be quite
choosey regarding which sites are accepted.
Exitpoint helps utilizing the full capacity web exit traffic.
Imagepoint serves visual ads. Known to the rest of the
world as Image ads.
Underpoint serves
pop-under ad windows.
Searchpoint (beta) features enhanced search capabilities, which enhance
your users’ experience and generate additional profit.
Registration is free and they pay back a minimum of 60% of the total
on-click revenue. Payment options include Bank checks, PayPal and Wire transfers
(if eligible).
At first look FastClick would appear to be
one of the better alternatives to Google's Adsense however,
they are one of many online advertising companies that tend
to favor the large customers. You'd think companies would
have learnt from Google's success and accepted that the way
to make money is to target both large and small. Remember
Excite? They went the way of the dodo because they only
targeted the top 100 companies rather than the small guys
who can't afford large TV adverts and have to advertise on
the Internet instead. Anyway, I digress. If you can get
yourself accepted to FastClick (now called ValueClick) then
you will probably be able to run some reasonably high paying
adverts on your site but most small website owners will find
that FastClick simply aren't interested.
Advertising wise FastClick (ValueClick) offer an industry-average
65-percent monthly payout on all advertising revenue your
website generates. Fastclick pays by the 25th of the month for the
previous month by check or PayPal.
