Alternatives to Google Adsense and why you need them

If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you’ll probably know that sometimes daily posts appear here, and sometimes weeks can pass without a new post. The reason for this is that work (i.e. stuff that pays the mortgage) are more important than non-work related activities such as blogging.

In order to help redress this imbalance, I set up some ads using Google Adsense some time ago. Sometimes they made enough money to cover the hosting costs (particularly with some of the more popular posts) but nothing much. I stumbled across a few articles about how I can optimise adsense, again nothing special.

Recently I updated the filters to filter out Ads I didn’t really want to run. Then one day Google cancelled my Adsense account. I still don’t know why. Now I could be like the zillions of other people out there who whinge about lost revenue and so on, but to be honest my lost revenue probably equates to little more than a few pints of beer in the pub and a nice meal. So instead I decided to have a look around at what’s available, what’s good and what’s not.

1.


Chitika Mini-Malls is essentially a drop-in replacement for adsense. In terms of payments they don’t offer the greatest incentives in the world, but their adverts look quite nice and can be customized to fit in with your site quite easily. The downside is that whilst you can see from the reporting what your ‘unaudited’ revenues are (raw clicks) you have to wait until the accounts are audited before you get an adjusted value. Chitika has screwed up with this in the past and if you’re looking to make millions from this, it’s probably not for you. If on the other hand you’re looking for something easy to integrate and quite different looking then it’s worth going for.

2.

AdBrite is used by sites such as Gawker, eBaumsWorld and of course BoingBoing. With big sites going for it you might not think it’s for you, but it allows you to set your own prices. For example, that big banner up at the top of the page can be yours for just US$1.00. You can get an ad in the text ads space on the right for US$28/week or US$4/day. If you were to actually advertise there I’d have to approve the ad first, and knowing that there’s an advert coming I’d know that I need to start writing more content in order for the advertiser to get a return. Of course, people actually need to want to advertise on my site, so for many of us the Interstitial option (where ads are drawn from a pool) is an option. I think that some of the coming research that I’m due to post (when I get round to it) would provide some niche players an option to take their products to market where it otherwise wouldn’t be there.

3.


Clicksor promise up to 85% of Advertising revenues (note the use of ‘up-to’). I’ve decided to use these initially instead of the MyReferrer account for the DecalGirl sponsored button. Don’t get me wrong, DecalGirl got a lot of clicks but as the advert was based on purchases it wasn’t performing as well as it could. I’m not sure how well I’ll do out of Clicksor (I’ll reserve judgement), and it’s possible that I’ll swap it with the adbrite text ads down the side if there’s demand from specific advertisers.

One thing you might want to be aware of is that the text ads do pop-unders. You can switch this off by setting clicksor_enable_pop = false; in the javascript.

4. Yahoo! Publisher Network.
Yahoo! Publisher Network looks like it might be a real contender to adsense. Unfortunately for me the beta requires you to be an American Citizen, which fortunately for me I’m not (just kidding, my septic friends). I’ll definately be keeping an eye on this one, and once it’s out of the door the competition should make for an interesting battle with Google.

5. The also-rans.
There’s a great round-up of the various alternatives (albeit cut and pasted from the sites themselves rather than providing experienced comment) at The Internet Search Engines FAQ. A less-detailed but more interesting round-up (complete with warnings) can be found on the excellent performancing blog.

Of course, now that I was free of AdSense’s contextual restrictions (as explained by the superb Darren Rowse), I was able to open up my Chitika settings. Furthermore, I was able to re-evaluate my current advertising strategy. If I was too reliant on one advertising provider I could easily end up in the same situation again 3-6 months down the line. I had 3 providers (Chitika, Adsense and a MyReferrer account that was reliant upon purchase rather than clicks to generate revenue) and was down to two. I’ve decided that what I’m going to do is stick with Chitika for now, set up Adbrite and replace the MyReferrer block with Clicksor, although I might swap it with the Adbrite block further down the page if it doesn’t perform too well.

I’ve also set up a donation page after reading Steve Pavlina’s excellent personal development blog. It never occured to me that people who’ve used Athena or the Proxylist might prefer to make a small donation rather than click on Ads, or indeed that they may have ad-blockers stopping them from appearing.

I’ll post an update once I’ve had a few months with this, but in the meantime I’d like to ask what on-line advertising model do you use, and how do you find it?