AdSense Publishers - How Many Invited to Alternate Networks?

And How Many Have Tested them Out?

[martinibuster]

There are some emails that are clearly bogus networks, link sellers. But there are a lot of other networks that are partners with large advertisers and advertising agencies.

Have you been approached by these networks?

Have you tested them out?

Media.net [media.net]

...our program allows advertisers to simultaneously utilize contextual relevance and user intent to target ads on top-brand high quality websites. Our system is capable of using text, image or flash creative designs and appending dynamic elements to create hybrid ad units in real-time. Advertisers also have tremendous flexibility to choose between CPC, CPM and CPA bidding models.

...Media.net has raised significant capital and is backed by the Ashmore Group (www.ashmoregroup.com) and the Directi Group (www.directi.com). Ashmore manages over US$35.3 billion (at 30 June 2010) in pooled funds, segregated accounts and structured products. Directi is a $300 million group of businesses that develops innovative mass-market web products for global customers

And here's another one I've been approached by, lijit.com [lijit.com], that has just been acquired by Federated Media [lijit.com].

About Lijit:

Lijit's advertising services provide publishers with a revenue stream that complements existing sales efforts to help you grow your website, build your business, and make more money.

We have direct partnerships with every major player in the industry - ad agencies, trading desks, DSPs, ad exchanges, ad optimizers, and ad networks - which enables us to maximize fill rates and CPMs. By providing you with greater exposure to a wide range of ad providers, we outperform even the most sophisticated revenue strategy for display advertising.

Our advertising services deliver:

• Quick and automatic payment, every 30 days.
  
• No upfront commitments. No restrictive contracts. No exclusivity requirements.
• Full reporting transparency on ad performance to help you optimize revenue, ad requests, ad impressions, CPM, fill rate, etc.
• Flexible ad delivery options (choose location, set your floor price, utilize pass-back tags).
• Best support in the business.

From the press release:

“Federated Media has a clear reputation as the market leader for connecting advertisers with the best of the Independent Web,” said Todd Vernon, Founder and CEO of Lijit Networks. “The combined company provides publishers of all shapes and sizes with a huge opportunity to grow and monetize their websites through a complete set of advertising offerings that best match their audience and readership. At the same time, advertisers have an unprecedented opportunity to reach the best and most authentic content at enormous reach and scale.”

[dhaliwal]

After a long time, something really interesting and useful on this forum. I do hope that more webmasters will share their experiences.

[jpch]

So many Ad Networks...so little space on my site. LOL. Seriously, if you've ever wondered just how many Ad Networks there are a picture is worth a thousand words. Found this on Lijit's blog:

[lijit.com ]

[netmeg]

Bing needs to offer an adsense alternative of their own to both get more exposure and offer more to advertisers, asap, I'd hit it.

Well they do, but it's been in closed beta for like three years at least. And there's other issues as well - namely, after the Binghoo merger, adCenter won't let advertisers split out their Bing and Yahoo advertising separately (either for search or display) And a *ton* of people got burned by the lousy quality of the Yahoo search partners (I pulled all my clients out of Yahoo several years before the merger just for that reason) So they're not willing to just open up the tap again on Bing display ads. Which means their publisher program sits in eternal limbo. It's a shame, really.

[bwnbwn]

Tried many of the above and it just doesn't make near what adsense does. Many brought up here require much more work and time spent on a daily basis. Just nothing I can find comes close.

I rebuilt a website that was pounded by Panda. I added a very well know affilate program moved adsense to the very bottom of the pages.
Built pages related to each state and lead.

This was completed 3-6 months ago not really sure I could search for the post but need to get back to work. I still make more with adsense at the bottom of the poages. Traffic is picking up, leads to the affilate are going down so I am adding adsense to the top of the pages as well. This will be an intresting experitment for me to see what increase I do get from adsense, because I see the traffic terms we are getting and should be converting way better than I am being reported.

[xpsk1d]

I've got contacted by lijit, but I'm not sure if they are actually better than adsense. Also at the same time I'm wondering if I completely switch off adsense off my site, that could potentially hurt my rankings in the search engine. I'm ranking #1 for my main keyword right now, even after all the panda updates.

I use vibrantmedia as well and I get a good amount of cash from them for just running in-text links.

Media.net is garbage to me. They don't want to show you how many clicks you get and they always give you numbers that you just don't know what's going on, if they wanted to skim some cash off the top of your revenues they could of they wanted to.

[dataguy]

Tried Tribal Fusion. They did pretty well on a limited trial, but when I increased their impressions their CPM dropped to about 1% of what it had been. I wonder how many ad networks do this.

I've been trying Value Click Media for a few months. Their ads are pretty high quality and they've been pretty consistent in their pay. Nothing close to AdSense, but they've been working well as a supplement to AdSense.

Kontera used to pay us better than anything else next to AdSense, but that changed when they restructured their company last year.

These companies have all been around for a while, the only new company we've tried this year is AdSide. With their slide-out ads that appear when the reader gets to the end of the page, they appear to offer something new. Their payout hasn't been too good, but I've kept them on a few of my sites just because they are unobtrusive and I've never seen them slow down a page load. Load time is a big factor for us.

To me, the biggest factor though is the question of what would happen if a supplemental ad network takes clicks away from AdSense ads. To us, this would mean we receive about 10% of the revenue. It would take a lot of clicks from supplemental networks to make up for that.

[anshul]

Personally, I feel CPM-based or rented-space advertising makes more sense than PPC or click-based or affiliate-sales based.
This is nice post to know about Media.net or Lijit but wandering if they already have lots of publishers and why they are contacting AdSense publishers. What's the criteria of publishers selection?

[netmeg]

I wonder how some of these third party networks are going to work now that Google is taking back the keyword data on SSL searches?

[Leosghost]

Very badly ?

[alika]

Value Click Media for a few months. Their ads are pretty high quality

Really? Their ads were the lowest of the low for us. I had to turn them off and not use them because I don't have the time to go through and uncheck all their incredibly inane blinking ads.

Kontera used to pay us decently - about 15% of what we get from Adsense -- but that has halved considerably after their restructuring

Chitika we used but cut down considerably. They emailed us to say we've been smartpriced, so we remove most of their code on the site. Funny, because our earnings even improved with only about 20% of what we used to give them in terms of pages.

We sell our ads, but last year and this year as well things slowed to a crawl. We're seeing some light as we're getting more ad buyers now, but still not the level before the recession. But direct sale of our ads remain our #2 biggest ad source, compared to other ad networks combined

I had high hopes when the leading print magazine in our niche signed us up to be part of their ad network, but we never got any checks from them after 6 months. I'm just keeping them on the site for "goodwill" purposes

[IanCP]

Kontera used to pay us decently

In terms of revenue? Yes. Actual payment? I never get paid without having to remind them. About 14 days late this month.

The only programme I've ever experienced that problem in nearly fourteen years.

[azn romeo 4u]

I use to review a bunch of adnetworks. I think one time I joined like 50 of them for a review site I had. I was giving the networks, 50k impressions a day for the review that lasted 1-5 days. Here's what I know.

#1 Adsense
#2 Tribalfusion
#3 Valueclick Media
#4 CasaleMedia
#5 Yahoo Publisher Network (when it was alive)

The rest are pretty much garbage. There are a few other good one's but most don't compete with the one's above IMO base on my own tests. Other people probably had better results.

[alika]

@IanCP

We get a check from Kontera regularly, without problem

The ad rep also routinely checks on us and emails, letting us know how our site is performing and any new programs they have

[ken_b]

We get a check from Kontera regularly, without problem

The ad rep also routinely checks on us and emails, letting us know how our site is performing and any new programs they have

That's pretty much been my experience with Kontera too.

But occasionally something goes wacky and earnings drop off a cliff. When that happens, I just delted the Kontera code for a day or two. About that time I'll get an email from my rep saying they noticed the drop in impressions, so I put the code back, and happy days are back again! :) No idea why. Happy means 15 - 20 of what AdSense pays most months.

[ember]

Kontera pays about 1% of what Adsense does but is something a little extra. Tried media dot net, but they don't track clicks and do not respond to emails. Tried lijit dot com but their ads do not target and all seem to be images, no text ads. So adsense still rules.

[ken_b]

On a related note, recently I've been getting solicitations asking about placing some network or another on my site... "example.com". The only problem is I don't own or manage "example.com".

I'm thinking that if they can't get the domain with the proper owner/manager they probably aren't worth looking at very seriously. :)

.

[yaix2]

Just got an email from "Adcitrus" and am trying it now, mainly because it has different languages (Spanish, German, etc).

[numnum]

Chitika is pleading with me to give their service another go. They're offering twice their usual payout through the end of 2011, but only if I take advantage of this offer by end of October (four days from now). Has anyone noticed any improvement in Chitika CPC since they went into the crapper about a year ago?

And I wonder whether Goog might now penalize sites that include Chitika code even though Goog allows Chitika ads to run on the same page as Adsense.

[mike2010]

Been trying Lijit & Media.net for the last 10 days or so.

Very impressed with Lijit... not so much with Media.net , because their more or less a Google LinkUnit type advertiser. Where visitors have to click twice in order for you to get a dime. (if i'm missing something, lemme know)

Also, i'm looking for an advertising network big on Interstitial ads.. and are kind of easy to get into.
we were already denied by Burst, Valueclickmedia, Casale, 24/7... any others left ?

EDIT : I just noticed AdManage mentioned a couple times on other sites about having good paying Interstitial ads. But I haven't seen them mentioned in this thread once. Are they good ?

[Zivush]

Anyone tried Chitika?

[mike2010]

Chitika was horrendous for us. Extremely insulting rates.

[Sally Stitts]

Chitika is my #2 ad supplier, after AdSense. At one point, I estimated their EPC average at 5 cents.

A while back, they decided to hide their poor performance by removing click data (# of clicks, CTR), thereby making it impossible to determine what their EPC is.

Because of this, I only give them my poorest performing AdSense pages, mainly so that I don't dilute my AdSense stats. If they provided the d@mned stats, I would test them on other pages, but blindly with no data? No way.

You serve ads? Then you provide the d@mned stats, unless you are a pack of idiots! I really find this exasperating and hard to believe. Management by ostrich theory (head in the sand). Please use our service, but we won't tell you how your ads are performing. Mind-boggling.
.

[mike2010]

Dude Sally... Their rippin you.

Try Lijit . I'm still very impressed with them and have only had them up for like 3 weeks now. This thread is what initially turned me on to them. (much higher rates..trust me)

Not as good as Google, but pretty close behind.

[numnum]

Sally, did you take advantage of Chitika's special year-end offer? (See my earlier post about my invitation from Chitika, in this thread.)

If so, then you've boosted your EPC to 10 cents (woo-hoo!), at least for a few months.

[numnum]

Lejit pays publishers only on a CPM basis (per impression), and not on a CPC (per click) or per action (e.g., purchase) basis, right? Or am I wrong?

[mike2010]

correct numnum regarding Lijit & CPM , rates are much better.

I don't know how they do it, they just do.

They let you set your CPM default as well...so if they don't match what your looking for, you could redirect all your traffic (or partial traffic) elsewhere. Very good support as well. Usually respond within hours each time.

[numnum]

Regarding Lijit,

I suppose this a naive question, but under the CPM model what is the publisher's incentive to place the ad block in a highly visible position, when all that matters is the number of page impressions? Why not just put the ad in the page footer rather than above fold? My best guess is that the amount that advertisers are willing to bid on ads appearing at your site depends in part on the click-through and conversion rates. But even this doesn't entirely make sense to me.

[Swanny007]

I tried Lijit for a week. The CPM was less than half of Tribal Fusion in the same spot. I would definitely not recommend Lijit.

[mike2010]

Of course Tribal is going to outperform , their one of the top dawgs.

But we've tried AdTegrity , Chitika , CPXinteractive , and others...which have all been around for much longer than Lijit. But all couldn't even get close to Lijit's rates.

[jpch]

Has anyone heard of or used AdStract? They specialize in video ads.