Adsense Alternatives?
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Well the 5k race went really well yesterday, and I had a great time. It was a Halloween themed race and a lot of people dressed up in all sorts of costumes (you can imagine how serious the race was!).
I managed to beat the guy dressed as a banana and the girl dressed as a cupcake, but Fred Flinstone kicked my ass…and I’m sort of ok with that. Cavemen are badass, they had to outrun T-rex’s and stuff…you can’t compete against that!
Today I want to talk a little about alternatives to Adsense.
Personally, I use Adsense because they’re the industry leader, are really easy to use, and seem to pay out the most. But a lot of people have problems with them.
What kind of problems?
Well, Google seems to routinely ban people from the Adsense program. They’ve gone so far as to have written into their terms and conditions that if you are banned once, you agree not to sign up again.
Of course, people get around that all the time by signing up under different company names (either by forming a new corporation or LLC), but it can still be dramatic to have Google instantly cut off 100% of your income on what seems like a whim.
I’ve known people who have blatantly violated Google’s Adsense terms and conditions get banned… I’ve also known people who inadvertently violated some small rule and got banned. I’ve also met people who haven’t seemed to do a thing wrong at all get banned.
And Google will keep whatever money they owe you. Ouch!
So If you earned $5,000 last month, and $3,500 up to the 20’th of this month…Google won’t have been scheduled to pay you that $5,000 till the end of the current month and won’t have been scheduled to pay you that $3,500 till the end of next month…violate their terms and they’ll kick you out and keep the $5,000 and the $3,500.
So what can you do?
The obvious thing to do is diversify. Use a variety of different advertising networks on your sites. You might build 100 adsense sites, 100 sites using ad network X, and 100 sites using ad network Y. Etc.
This begs the question….what other Ad networks should you use?
To tell you the truth…I’ve never used any other ad network besides Adsense. I’ve been meaning to, and I plan on doing so soon because since the last two Panda updates, Adsense has been paying out about half what they had been on a cost per click basis before Panda. This rubs me the wrong way since Google announced last week that they ended the quarter with record profits.
Of course, it’s also entirely possible that it’s the economy, and advertisers are simply not paying out as much. But it seems a little far fetched that ALL advertisers would do this simultaneously, across the hundreds of different industries that buy ad space on my hundreds of websites. But I digress..
Saveral ad networks have been recommended to me, and I’ll be trying them all out. They include
- Chitika.com
- Shopzilla.com
- Infolinks.com
- Contextweb.com
- Media.net
- Lijit.com
These are just a few to get you started, there are dozens more that are fairly reputable (at least reputable enough to try out).
One of these days I’ll also write an article about an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while that involves turning your amazon.com affiliate program into a contextual ad that looks like Adsense ads…but more on that later.
In the mean time, keep on building…
-John
The Marketing Fool!
