Web Blog of Greg Mathews

I posted this in response to a post on a forum recently.

I believe Adsense is going down hill, but realistically online what other alternatives are there for publishers?

1. Adbrite

I’ve only just started placing adbrite on my site but it concerns me that if you have an ad unit with 4 ads and Adbrite charge say $5/ad for a week, you will just earn $10/week as 50% of income goes to Adbrite. Adbrite does adjust the cost of the ad automatically based on various factors but as an example, my site with an average of 10,000 impressions a day would need the cost of an add to be $100/ad per week so I can earn the same as I do from Adsense.

In addition, I have not yet seen an Adbrite network ad on my site, Adbrite are just placing my Adsense code that I provided which makes me wonder if they even have advertisers willing to pay the same as those on Adsense.

2. Yahoo Publishers Network

This looks like it could be a good alternative but as it is US only I can’t comment.

3. Commission Junction

I looked at these a few months ago with the intention of using a script to dispaly CJ advertisers based on the content of the page. (my own context advertising script). Firstly I found it time consuming finding enough advertisers that where suitable for my site to enable me to display different advertisers. Secondly, I started getting emails from either CJ or the advertisers themselves saying that the specific ads I had selected are no longer being used or they are no longer advertising through CJ. This meant I had to go back and change/delete the advertisers from my site and find replacement ads. In the end I stopped using CJ and reverted to Adsense so I do not know what earnings could have made.

4. Other Affiliate Programs

This has similar problems to CJ, you need to spend time finding enough GOOD Affiliate programs that relate to your content and so the same ad is not constantly being displayed, this is again very time consuming and not something I have really tried to do yet.

I have written (well almost finished) a perl ‘context ads’ script simular to adsense and adbrite but again finding enough advertisers to build a viable advertising network is not the easiest of things to do.

If you know if a good alternative to Adsense then I would love to hear about it.