6 Alternatives to Google Adsense
Google Adsense is great, but you pretty soon find out its limitations. It’s then that you start to look for alternatives to Google Adsense, so I thought I’d share with you my Top 10 List of Google Adsense Alternatives.
So, what’s wrong with Google Adsense? Nothing in itself, except there is a limit to how many advert units you can place on a page, if you rely on Google and your account gets banned you’re suddenly earning nothing, with no Plan B, some sites aren’t suitable for Google Adsense … so it’s best to experiment early and have alternatives to test and try. Make sure you don’t get caught - have YOUR Plan B in place!!
Adbrite
AdBright is probably the next largest company behind Google Adsense offering very similar features. There is less variation in ad formats, but they do provide you with some super tools for you to set up your in-text ads (similar to MIVA and Vibrant).
AdBright also offer something called ‘interstitial full page ads’ which you can set to pop up as people move through your site (I’m sure they pay well, but I just don’t like them so having tested them for awhile I removed these full page ads) - the benefit of these interstitial adverts is you get paid for every visitor, not every click, great if you’ve got a lot of traffic and nobody’s clicking (of course, you could re-write your site at that point instead!)
- You set the minimum CPC values for your ads and you can even exclude advertisers you don’t want.
- Payouts are roughly 75%. When they put their T&Cs together they had the small website owner and blogger in mind.
- You can run AdBrite on your site on the same page/s as your Google Adsense blocks, allowing you to maximize your CTR yet offering advertisers the chance to show their ads in your AdSense space.
Chitika
Chitika will display PPC adverts. Some of best things about Chitika are:
- You can use Chitika on the same pages as Google Adsense
- Chitika will only display adverts to your site visitors that find you from a search engine - and it will target those site visitors (clever, eh!)
- You can fully customise the colours and style.
- The Chitika referral system can provide you with an additional handy residual income.
- If you’re using Wordpress, then Chitika even provide you with a free Wordpress plugin
- You are paid via Paypal (I love it when companies do that, so easy)
- If you have more than one website, you’re completely free to use Chitika on all of your websites so long as the content on those sites meets with the Terms & Conditions.
Joining Chitika takes about 2 minutes, but then they advise you that it could be 2-3 working days before a human can check your website to approve you. They actually approved me within about 20 minutes!
ContextAd works with dynamic pages, adverts will change every time your page does, which is really how AdSense works.
- Each domain you own has to be approved, but this is an automated process. Once approved, you can run the ADSDAQ adverts on any of your pages within an approved domain.
- The minimum payout threshold is just $50/
- As a publisher, you set your CPM price, then you get to keep 100% of that price.
- You can block unwanted adverts.
- Gain access to hundreds of reputable advertisers.
- View the adverts which have been displayed in the past 7 days.
- You can’t use their adverts on pornographic sites or gambling sites.
- Your site should be in English.
BidVertiser
Bidvertiser is similar to Google AdSense, with a wide choice of advert layouts to use.
- You can block adverts you don’t want.
- You pick the adverts to show - and the prices - from a list showing you the max bid prices of each one. You approve adverts before any show, so each time you log in you’ll have a link saying “X adverts to approve”.
- There are quite a few ways to monitor how well your adverts are doing - and good income statistics available at the click of a button.
- Once you sign up as a publisher, you are automatically also an affiliate, so you can promote the system to your network of contacts, or on your website.
- The Bidvertiser payment threshold is just $10 and you can get paid instantly through PayPal once you’ve reached the threshold.
I’ve been using Bidvertiser for quite some time and am gettin pretty good results from it.
Some Beta Programmes Coming Soon From Yahoo and Microsoft
For completeness, I’ll just mention a couple of the big players, who, at the time of writing, are rolling out beta versions of their own ad networks.
Yahoo has its own advertising programme, just like Google Adsense and now you can join their advertising service if your site meets their strict criteria.
- Your site will need to be in English.
- You must have a US Social Security number for verification.
- The Yahoo payment threshold is the same as Google’s at $100.
This programme is still in Beta and a lot of people are already not being accepted, so they’re either quite picky or full up already.
Yahoo say that there will be a choice between four ways to to be paid, including by PayPal.
Microsoft ContentAds are coming to the party a little later than the others, but they’ve also now launched a Beta version of their new advertising system. At the moment it is only open to US Publishers
Microsoft have a very large advertisers network, so once this is rolled out to everybody this should be a lucrative income for publishers as well.
