Monetize website – comparison of advertisers

First of all, sorry for the lack of posts recently: university continued just some weeks ago and I got elected General Manager of a one-year lasting student company (It’s called Fold ‘n Joy and we plan to sell cardboard chairs at a low end price).

Anyway, today I wanted to share my experience with you that I made with different advertisers that can be used to monetize your website or blog. I will briefly list them here and then go in more detail one by one as far as I have information also the pros and cons of each advertiser will be shortly addressed.

http://www.google.com/adsense
http://www.kontera.com
http://www.miva.com
http://www.valueclick.com
http://www.burstmedia.com
http://www.tribalfusion.com
http://www.adconion.com

Google Adsense

Probably the most prominent Advertiser when it comes to monetizing websites.
It is often discussed whether Google Adsense is ripping off their users by selling low cost ads, which results in low income for the website/blog owner. I made the experience that it all has to do with positioning, coloring and last but not least the Ad Format. Every website owner should experiment with those three variables until he has the desired success.
Sometimes it is not smart at all to put Google Adsense on pages at all. At tech-sawy sites for instance, little people will click the text-links offered by Google. One thing, that does work really well -as far I as I experienced it- is the payout. I get my money on time (between 27th and 29th of every month) and straight to my savings account. Only downside is, that Google Adsense pays you in Dollar and in case of not living in America the Dollar is currently less worth than the Euro: Meaning for every Dollar I get only 70 Eurocent. A quick example: for 200$ earned a month with Google Adsense, I only receive 140 Euros. Still this is good money, but due to this currency fluctuation and a growing European Economy, I get less money for the same ads. Google Adsense offers a variety of different advertisement formats, such as the famous skyscraper banner, the rectangle banners, recommendation banners, Firefox recommendations with Google Toolbar and so on (maybe also interesting is the Google Picassa Photosoftware)

My intermediate recommendation is to sign-up at Google Adsense, nevertheless, read the other comments below, because maybe another advertising company is better suitable for you!

Kontera

The people at Kontera offer in-text ads, that means you don’t place banners on your site, but your existing content (text passages) are run through a filter and than advertisement links are added automatically. A Kontera context-link is indicated by a double underlined link. This -to me- looks very ugly, but on the other hand it is prominent and people might click it as it “sticks out”. Once you hover over one of these special links a tooltip will show with an image and some text in it. This is the actual ad. Another click takes you to the advertiser’s website. The sign-up process as Kontera was very easy: Though they do have some requirements to their publishers – you have to have a minimum of page impressions and loads of content. Every account is manually reviewed within few hours, at most one day. I got contacted by one Account Manager, Nick, who was very kindly welcoming me to Kontera and offering all kinds of help and advice, he also told me that I will be contacted by one of his co-workers to help me with the setup. The setup, as read later on, in this announced mail, is quite easy: you simply but a javascript at the very bottom of the page (in my case the footer.php of my templates).
Downside: The ads are not content-related; that is why I chucked it off after 48 hours. Nick promised me to personally try to achieve a higher level of content-relation, but this did not work out.
My recommendation: keep an eye out for Kontera, they are a nice bunch of people, but their system does not work that well. At least it did not for me. No-one clicked those ads in 48 hours and that is 20,000+ impressions actually.

Miva

When I signed up for Kontera, I also signed up at Miva to compare response time and the ad formats. At miva they also have specific requirements for sign-ups. I urge you to read through those before, else you might not get accepted or get any reply at all. Anyway, I signed up and received a “go” after two days, which was quite okay, yet slower than Kontera. The ad formats range between rectangle and square banners and in-text relevancy ads. I tried out the rectangle banners for three days and earned a whopping 9 cent for 5992 impressions. Quickly dealt with the removal I can say that the pay-out is miserable and the relevancy not existent.

ValueClick

When I tried to sign-up at Valueclick some months ago I received 12,500 daily unique visitors and had an alexa ranking of 30,000 and rising (when I did all those free wordpress themes, remember?) – Formally I met their requirements (5000+ visitors a day), but still they did not accept my website as it is “(actual quote) a blog-like website that we do not support”. See, blogs are bad and people on blogs don’t click on ads, that is why it is not of interest to ValueClick. Strange thing is, that my mate’s website, www.christinazone.com (that I designed and coded) runs on Wordpress, too. It is also “some kind of blog”, yet ValueClick likes to advertise there and he receives less than 12,500 uniques a day. I believe it is about targeting, as teenagers and young adults are more prone to click on those ads than my tech-sawy visitors here on h4×3d.com – so no ValueClick testing results here…
One disadvantage though that is very obvious: their website is cluttered and hard to find the sign-up form for publishers.

Burst!Media

Exactly the same as Valueclick above, but with one addition, they did not reply for weeks.

TribalFusion

Similar to Burst!Media, but from TribualFusion I have only heard bad things so far, so I was not surprised to get not accepted.

Adconion

Adconion seems quite “global” and large, they do have specific requirements about who signs up and who gets accepted. I have only applied as by today, I will be adding my experience with them as soon as I can.

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