Media.net, customizing ads appearance

[Travis]

I've joined Media.net some years ago, and like a lot of publishers, it was good at first, then collapsed.

Thinking about Media.net again today, I am wondering if I missed something.

On their homepage, and examples, they show extremely customized ad designs, claiming that you can do all this. However, from their dashboard, there are some customization possible, with some templates, for which you can chance colors, but nothing compared to what they are showing in their examples.

So did I miss something? Their dashboard is rather simple, and I do not see any tools about more advanced customization.

[cajuns]

I think we are both missing something. They were great in the beginning, but now, I really don't see how anyone is making an income from them at all. I have tried several times over the years, and it's just not possible for me to earn much of anything with them. Others may, but I sure can't. I have had them back up for about a week, now they are fixing to come back off again.

[Travis]

Yes, I am puzzled at media.net. Excepting if this is lie, they are supposedly powering Yahoo and Bing ! So this should give them a huge base. They claim to have the largest inventory in the World, etc ...

I was invited, during their pre-launch. For the first few weeks, it was really bad, they claimed it was part of the learning curve of their system, in order to identify the best ads. Then , it's true that after 2 weeks, all of a sudden money flowed greatly. Good CPC, very good targeting, Then all of a sudden, after one month all collapsed to near zero. Then later, they started to integrated ads from Google, and made me sign to something at Google, to unlock my main site, for a premium inventory, and media.net started to earn me good money again, ... for one month, then all stopped again.

So I don't know if all of this was to make the buzz, to sell themselves to the Chinese investor for $900 millions.

[cajuns]

I don't get it either. Same thing with me, at first it was terrible, because of the "learning curve" then it got better, made really good money for a while. Then it all went downhill, and has never come back. They keep saying, leave the ads and let us optimize them, it's a "learning curve". Well, if they haven't learned my website by now, I'm sure not going to give them any more free advertising, as that is what it amounts to with the amount of money I am not making! Somebody has to be making money with them, but I don't know how.

[Travis]

@cajuns, yesterday [webmasterworld.com...] , I starting to consider the fact that "may be" the issue with Media.net "might" be with the way they fetch the content of pages. Long ago, I asked them if they used a bot/crawler, and they said "no" (?) but didn't tell me how they were identifying the theme of a page, to display contextual ads. (they are contextual ad network, this is written in big on their front page). So may be there is an issue around this.

[cajuns]

@Travis, You may be right. I did find out, that you have to ask them to turn on display ads. They do not automatically do it. Or at least it was that way in my case. So many of the good advertisers have went downhill. :(