Which ad network should work best for your blog?

Adsense, BSA, Amazon associates…There’s lots of advertising networks available to monetize your blog. Though each ad network has its particularities and depending on your blog niche, not all of them will provide the same results.

In this article, we’ll study the most popular ad networks to help you find which one best suits your blog.

Adsense

Who doesn’t know Adsense? Launched in 2004, Google Adsense was an instant success. Joining Adsense is quick and easy and even very small sites can become Adsense Publishers. However, it is well known that Adsense doesn’t make a lot of money in particular niches as such web development or design.
Works best on : High traffic website, websites with high CPC, niche sites.
» Visit Adsense

BuySellAds

If you’re used to visiting design blogs, you’ll know how popular 125*125px sidebar ads are. BuySellAds handle the sale of your ads and provide you with detailed stats about your earnings, clicks, ads, etc.
All sites have to be approved to join and only quality websites are accepted. Note that BSA are now accepting websites of all kinds.
Works best on : Content-focused blogs
» Visit BuySellAds

Text Links Ads

If you don’t like graphic ads but still want to make money with your blog, Text Links Ads can be a good idea. As the name says, they sell text ads. I’m using it on Cats Who Code and TLA are paying me $60 to $80 monthly, which is not bad consider that you have to multiply income sources to make money online.
Works best on : Any kind of low/middle traffic with pagerank 2+.
» Visit TextLinksAds

Amazon Associates

Initially a “simple” online book seller, Amazon grew and became one of the biggest online shops of the internet. They are now selling various products as such as books, dvds, clothes, and much more.
They also have an affiliate program which allows you to earn 5% of each order refered. 5% may sounds like peanuts at first, but depending on your blog niche it can be a good deal.
Works best on : Book reviews blogs, any websites about products sold at Amazon.
» Visit Amazon Associates

Ebay

Who doesn’t know Ebay? For more than ten years, this site lead the auction market. I’ve already shown you how I make money using Ebay and this technique is very good to monetize undeveloped domain names.
But of course, you can do more with Ebay affiliates, for example, you can display banners on your site. This may sound very basic but the main pros of Ebay banners are that they change very often so your visitors won’t become bored and you can choose the family of products you want to display.
Ebay pays up to $15 if you get someone create an account and buy a product. If you refer an existing customer, your commission will be a lot lower.
Works best on : Any kind of site that talks about products sold on Ebay.
» Visit Ebay Affiliates

Chitika

Founded in 2003, Chitika is a Google Adsense alternative. You can use their ads along with Adsense, or as a replacement. The good point with Chitika is that unlike Adsense, they don’t have “Smart Pricing” features. I never tested Chitika on my blogs but I have heard good things about them. For example Darren Rowse reported that Chitika is his second best income source.
Works best on : Any kind of sites.
» Visit Chitika

AdBrite

AdBrite looks like Adsense, and works like Adsense. They display contextual ads like Adsense do. So why should you use AdBrite instead of Adsense? Because AdBrite doesn’t have any “Smart Pricing” features and Adbrite pays by check, which is useful for people who live in a country where you can’t receive money via Paypal.
Works best on : Any kind of site, especially those with bad results with Adsense.
» Visit AdBrite

Kontera

Kontera provides what they call contextual in-text advertising: Once installed, Kontera will scan your website content and automatically ad links on specific keywords.
To be honest, I don’t like in-text advertising and I find it too much intrusive. Whilst I think monetizing your website is great, you should never forget that your visitors are the most important asset you have.
Works best on : “All audience” websites.
» Visit Kontera

And you, which ad network are you using on your own blog? Do you plan to use one of those I’ve listed?

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28 Comments

  1. Darren
    Posted December 30, 2009 at 5:25 pm | Permalink

    Great list, some very good information. I haven’t decided what to use on my blog so I wondering about this thanks

  2. Posted December 30, 2009 at 7:27 pm | Permalink

    Yes, thanks very much for this awesome list! I haven’t heard of chitika or adbrite, but now I’m inspired to install OpenX and try these out against my adsense revenue.

  3. Nick Bostic
    Posted December 30, 2009 at 7:28 pm | Permalink

    I had a site sandboxed by Google once for running Text Link Ads. Do you know if this is still a risk or if they’ve done something to help prevent this?

  4. Posted December 30, 2009 at 8:16 pm | Permalink

    @Nick Bostic : I heard similar stories to yours but never had any problem of this kind.
    [EDIT : CWC is now PR0...Punish by the Google dictators for selling text links]

  5. Posted December 30, 2009 at 8:30 pm | Permalink

    Thanks a lot for this one. Gr8 post in this Kontera & Adbrite sucks

    Kontera adds ads like spam throughout the post & people will feel irritated
    Adbrite dont have much ads to show & not at all related to page & you know i wasted lot of income potential because of adbrite
    I got 90000 page views in adbrite & got just 30$ Adbrite Sucks

  6. Posted December 30, 2009 at 9:47 pm | Permalink

    Before now I was using AdSense and AdBrite together. AdSense isn’t clicked much, although every click brings more money than a month of AdBrite’s per-impressions system. At least in AdBrite, every day you login the sum increases.

    After you told that BuySellAds now accept all kinds of sites again, I tried it out again (I was denied in the past), and wow, I indeed got approved. Now to find advertisers, hehe ^^;;

    If to speak only about how I feel using these systems, BuySellAds would go on place #1. It is designed very well in matters of aesthetics and usability.

  7. Posted December 30, 2009 at 11:38 pm | Permalink

    I don’t know if Adsense is still relevant those days…

  8. Posted December 31, 2009 at 12:57 am | Permalink

    BSA + AdSense + Advertisers approaching via contact form

    I have BSA about 3 months on my blog, but managed to sell only 2 adspots. The first one didn’t renew it the next month but he approached me via contact form for a different kind of advertisement (text link). The second one was my friend :) So i earned about $25 from BSA and $80 from direct approach.

    AdSense made me, let me check… $20.78, almost like BSA :) It would be more but i removed the ads a month ago and since then i only have one little image ad at end of the posts.

    It’s strange that BSA isn’t better, i had approx 50K impressions monthly (lower now because i’m low on new content, from January posts are gonna be much more frequent), but i’m hoping that 2010 will be the year i will start earning some decent amount from BSA.

  9. Posted December 31, 2009 at 8:17 am | Permalink

    I didn’t like using AdBrite, mostly because their ads were borderline sleazy/x-rated (maybe r-rated is more accurate). But the thing that pushed them away from my sites was one of the ads they ran was trying to embed/install bad things on my visitor’s computers.

    Adsense has been very successful for me on my Christmas Music web site, very much a niche web site. I’d love to hear thoughts about using Advertising.com for ads.

  10. Posted December 31, 2009 at 9:24 am | Permalink

    Thank you for this nice list of ad network. I am using only Chitika, but not earning good.

    I am just trying to sell private ads on my blog. Most of ad network do not accept my blogspot blog.

  11. Posted December 31, 2009 at 10:21 am | Permalink

    Can anyone recommend any good resources for learning how to start your own ad network for a particular niche?

  12. Posted December 31, 2009 at 4:30 pm | Permalink

    A good list I must say. However I would like to mention infolinks for text ads. I have tried Kontera and it is simply not worth trying. Infolinks works much better and everyone should give it a shot.

    Wish you all a very happy and prosperous year (read a year with good ad revenue) 2010 :)

  13. Posted January 2, 2010 at 11:25 am | Permalink

    Jean you have missed Tribal Fusion and Value Click.Those two are very important.And Never go for text link ads.You will be punished by google and will lose all your Page Rank and traffic too.

  14. Posted January 2, 2010 at 6:25 pm | Permalink

    @Saad : You’re right about TLA, sadly. Google put Cats WHo Code on Pagerank 0 because I sell text links on it. What a bunch of crappy dictators, trying to make you do what they want you to do…Pathetic.

  15. Posted January 2, 2010 at 9:37 pm | Permalink

    @Jean : Well adsense offers TLA so that’s the best way to make you use adsense and not something else. Stuff like that are illegal in the real world but not illegal in web world, let’s hope they will be soon. After all, that’s all we can…

  16. Posted January 3, 2010 at 6:32 pm | Permalink

    Hi!
    Thanks for this post.
    I’m using ValueClickMedia (sinse september 2008) and it is a very good ad network…
    I advise you to try it! ;)

  17. Posted January 4, 2010 at 8:52 am | Permalink

    I agree with Athul…. Adbrite sucks!

  18. Posted January 4, 2010 at 9:00 am | Permalink

    IMO Bidvertiser, Tribal fusion, Smowtion also works great ..

  19. Posted January 4, 2010 at 3:36 pm | Permalink

    I am very new to the blog ads game, so I don’t have money figures for you, but I am using lijit.com. It has several features, random text ads by Google being one of them. Maybe if I had a larger readership, I would get rotated into larger sponsorships. Lijit integrates well with my site.

  20. Posted January 6, 2010 at 11:14 am | Permalink

    Yup, definitely stay away from selling text links – either directly or through a network. Sad, but if you want Google traffic, gotta play by their rules.

    As for other forms of advertising – different things work for different people and they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive either.

  21. Posted January 10, 2010 at 3:16 pm | Permalink

    Does AdSense pay via PayPal?

  22. Posted January 10, 2010 at 3:38 pm | Permalink

    @Paul Sanduleac : No, AdSense pays by cheque or wire transfer, but no Paypal.

  23. Posted January 19, 2010 at 5:06 pm | Permalink

    I used Adsense about 6 months since I started my Blog. Profits are a bit Meh… My blog doesn’t have a major source of visits, I have between 2.5K to 5K per day. So it averages around 80K visits per month. Adsense isn’t very profitable for me, but I only run text links with adsense.

    I also use BSA on the side bar, I had 1 publisher for 3 months now, but I’m running it for about 3 months only also. I recently added TLA to the sidebar, marked as Ads because I like to come clean. 1 Day up and I’ve already had 1 bought link, which is great.

  24. Posted January 21, 2010 at 7:24 am | Permalink

    Hi All,

    I found this page (kinda by accident) and love all the input. My story is slightly different. I actually worked in SEO for a major agency and quit my job because my affiliate revenue allowed me to. Adsense makes me about $750 per month. I get about 30k pageviews per month but my traffic is very targeted. The rest of the money I make is through selling products via Commission Junction, Shareasale, and Linkshare.

    I can tell you all one thing; it takes time. My main blog has over 1,000 posts which is enough for me to make $100 in revenue without even adding a new post. I’m not bragging but trying to give you all some encouragement.

    There are lots of avenues to provide value and make money. I’ve used YieldBuild and am very happy with the results. Also, instead of using OpenX I’ve created my own way to rotate ads by using Adify.

    eBay won’t allow me to sign up, so if anyone knows how to make that happen I’d love to find out. Otherwise, I’m going to try ValueClick and see if they do anything for me.

  25. Posted April 30, 2010 at 8:49 pm | Permalink

    I use Word Press to create my blog, so which ad types are acceptable? They don’t accept Adsense?

  26. Posted May 1, 2010 at 10:14 am | Permalink

    I am using Infolinks in my blog. Does that comes under Text Link Ads ? If so, will I lose my PR by using it ? If not, what is the difference between Contextual In-Text Ads and Text Link Ads ?

  27. Posted June 8, 2010 at 12:32 pm | Permalink

    BRILLIANT ARTICLE!!! Wish that I read it awhile ago.

    I’m starting a web dev blog and see that AdSense on its own may not make sense for me. From this article, it appears that I should be focusing my monetizing efforts using a combination of AdSense, Chikita, and AdBrite. Just wondering if anyone has an opinion on this?

    And, of course, I’ll be focusing on good content and SEO.

  28. Posted June 17, 2010 at 7:07 pm | Permalink

    I think adsense is the best cpc in the world.

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    Which ad network should works best on your blog…

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