WebRevenue.org | Increase your Website Revenue

AdSense often represents a small part (or no part) of the total revenues earned by a website. In a previous article we published an exhaustive list of the dozens of alternatives to Google’s ubiquitous AdSense advertising network. In this article we’ll get up-close and personal with a couple of these alternative networks. We’ll tell you what the differences are, and we’ll discuss why you may (or may not) see an increase in revenues with some alternative advertising strategies.

Could you be making more money?

The answer depends largely on your site. In order to correctly project revenues for any particular blog or website we would first need the answers to questions like: What is your blog about? What is your target market? Do you sell merchandise? Does your blog discuss any kind of consumer products? Etc.

For that reason, the question of whether or not any one of the following advertising networks is right for you, isn’t a question that can be answered in a general sense. The only real test is to give a new network a try, and see what happens to your earnings. Remember that many affiliate networks can take time to yield revenues — so “giving a new network a try” should involve at very least a one month trial.

Without further delay — let’s take a look at some alternatives to AdSense:

1) Clicksor

Clicksor is giving Google AdSense some serious competition these days, especially among smaller website publishers. The most attractive thing about Clicksor is that they pay out a whopping 85% of revenues.

That means if an advertiser is paying $1 per click, Clicksor is passing a whopping .85 to the site owner. The primary Clicksor advertising model is “in line” contextual advertising links. A clicksor text link ad looks just like a regular link on a page. If you move your mouse over that link, you’ll see a temporary DHTML popup floating over the link.

Clicksor also offers multiple other advertising styles including “Text Banner Ads”, “Rich Media / Flash banners”, “Pop Unders” and more. It should also be noted that Clicksor’s rich-media banners pay an average CPM of .50, which is significantly higher than the average AdSense ad unit. Webrevenue.org tested Clicksor on some other websites and we were duly impressed. The relevance of the advertising seemed to be equal to or higher than Google’s ad relevance. And the revenue generated in our particular case, seemed to be a clear improvement. Clicksor also offered two methods of payment: Check or Paypal.

One mild negative to the Clicksor network, is that their reporting and management tools are not as good as Google’s. Google also has better control over the look and feel of the text link ads — which allow AdSense ads to blend nicely with existing page content.

2) Yahoo! Publisher Network

Yahoo!’s Publisher Network is first rate alternative to Google AdSense. The network is extremely similar to Google’s and offers nearly identical ad formats and styles. It is believed that the payout percentage offered by Yahoo! is also equal to Google’s.

Yahoo!’s administrative tools appear to be a notch up from Google’s in terms of graphical quality, and sophistication — making site analysis easier and potentially more profitable.

One extremely nice feature of the Yahoo! Publisher Network is the ability to insert ads into RSS feeds, allowing web publishers to profit from sites who re-publish content through RSS.

Like Clicksor, Yahoo! Publisher Network also allows for compensation via PayPal.

3) AdBrite

Adbrite is a large advertising network (over 500 million impressions across over 50,000 sites) which includes in its network such well known sites as Alexa, LinkedIn, Excite and iWon. Also in their network are a-list blogs including The Drudge Report and BoingBoing. Adbrite supports standard ad unit types including text ads, inline link ads, banners and more. AdBrite also features full page interstitial units, video units and special interactive image units called “BritePics”.

AdBrite features an excellent level of ad customization allowing for seamless visual integration with all site designs. AdBrite even allows publishers to review ads before they appear on the site, and if AdBrite can’t meet a publisher’s minimum revenue requirement, publishers have the option to default to an alternate ad network like Google AdSense.

An interesting feature of the AdBrite network, is that ads can be sold/purchased directly on your page — at prices set by the publisher. (In other words if an advertiser wants a particular advertising space on your page, they can choose it — and publishers can set minimum pricing for these ads).

4) Chitika

Chitika’s network of over 15,000 blogs represents a somewhat different approach to online advertising. Not actually “advertisements” in the traditional sense of the word, Chitika’s interactive “eMiniMall” units actually extend the product’s information pages to your site. Instead of an advertisement for a product, Chitika publishes product and vendor information directly to a publisher’s pages. (As seen in the image below).

While eMiniMalls are only one of Chitika’s unit types, they are by far the most popular. Also worth noting is their ShopCloud format which creates a traditional “tag cloud” of related product links. Any click to the tag cloud generates per-click revenue to the publisher.

Clearly Chitika is not for everyone. On a political website, product sales may not be appropriate. But if your site deals with consumer goods, electronics, computer hardware, etc. Chitika may represent an excellent additional source of advertising revenue — and doesn’t clutter your pages with traditional looking ads.

Many More Options:

Clearly there are many, many more options than the four detailed above, and we’ll continue looking at more options in a later article. If anyone has first hand experiences with these or other networks, please drop us a note and share your experiences (good or bad).

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