Google AdSense is the current leader in content-sensitive web-based marketing. Webmasters can place Google AdSense JavaScript code on their web pages in order to allow Google's servers to show context sensitive advertisements (Google Adwords). The left hand side of this page shows an example of a Google AdSense skyscraper displaying a text or image ad. Google's terms and conditions are very strict such that many web publishers cannot use adsense adverts on their sites. They are either denied from joining the Google AdSense program in the first instance, or in a situation that is becoming more and more common do not wish to do business with Google. A number of publishers are also finding their Adsense accounts are being disabled for reasons that are completely beyond their control. The problem is that most of the alternatives to Google's Adsense are pretty useless. Most of the good adsense alternatives (such as doubleclick) are only interested in very large volume customers and so are not interested in the little guy with his blog who wants to earn a small income on the side. For this reason I have compiled my Top 10 alternatives to Google's Adsense that are ideal for the small time publisher. This site provides an updated list of the best website monetization programs that are available to webmasters. If you are a advertiser then you may be interested in these best alternatives to adwords. Has your adsense account been disabled? Then try these top 10 alternatives.
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Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka) is the industry's leading alternative to Google AdSense both in terms of Revenue and Size of Network (with 200,000+ active publishers worldwide). Chitika was founded in May 2003, is based in Massachusetts and is closely tied with Yahoo as witnessed by this May 2013 press release. In fact, when Yahoo shut down its Affiliate Program, they referred all publishers to Chitika.
Chitika began, not as a stand-alone advertising solution but instead as way to complement existing advertising / publishing programs through the use of additional Ad Units which were altogether different from the standard ad boxes, pop-unders etc that everybody else provided. Instead of displaying these 'industry standard' advert boxes with text and image ads that all look the same Chitika instead provided active boxes that showed targeted products from different manufacturers. If you ran a blog for example and discussed a product you might have found the Chitika box showing links for this product and competitors' products. If people purchased these products you would get paid a commission. This was referred to as affiliate marketing in the form of Premium Ad Units (eMinimalls).
Chitika has now progressed, however, into a fully-fledged advertiser service. The eMinimalls initially evolved into advertising units that would show adverts based on what people searched for to get to your site (exactly like Google AdSense). This is subtly different from the standard keyword driven advertising since it shows ads that are more relevant to the original intent of your visitors search. This greatly increases the chance that someone will click on an ad. This type of advertising is still offered by Chitika and is a good addition to a site containing traditional banner ads.
However, Chitika now goes beyond this, also offering what are termed premium ads. Chitika uses its proprietary "Click Prediction" technology to show select ads when there is a greater chance they will be clicked on. This is obviously a great way to improve your revenue.
For advertisers and media buyers, Chitika is a proven channel for targeting on-line consumers and qualified buyers. For all publishers, Chitika is an easy-to-use platform for earning daily ad revenue. If you visit a site showing Chitika's ads from a search engine then the Chitika premium ad unit kicks in showing you ads that are specific to your searching - otherwise the ad code falls-back to the page text and finds a suitable ad to display.
- Linx ad code - an in-text unit Linx ad units
can be run in addition to Chitika's standard ad units
and works best on sites with lots of text content. The
code will scan the page, determine the words which
should net the highest CPCs and underlines them. When
the user mouse-s-over the word, a small, highly targeted
text ad is shown.
- Hover ad code - a slider unit Hover ad units
can also be run in addition to the other ad types. It
also targets incoming search terms and in the absence of
that, it targets page content. The unit is a small
window that slides in the frame from the right-hand
side.
- Mobile ad code - automatic display of ads on mobile devices At the time of writing Chitika is one of the only advertising networks in the world (aside from Google) whose standard ad code can sense that the user is on a mobile device and automatically serves a mobile ad at the bottom of the screen specific to the device screen size.
Bidvertiser is an excellent alternative to Google and offers some intriguing ad formats including what they refer to as free design. This lets you specify the look and dimensions of your text ads. While a useful feature I have not investigated how well it works but imagine that while it sounds good on paper it could result in lower priced ads being displayed. I.e. most advertisers will probably want to keep control of the layout of their ads and so turn off support for Free design ads. All the standard ad formats exist, however, and the payouts are excellent. Pop-under ads and XML feeds are also supported. Bidvertiser have also recently introduced two knew features that can boost your earnings:
- Conversion Bonus
As far as I am aware Bidvertiser is the first affiliate marketer to offer this seemingly obvious service. As well as paying traditional CPC for each valid click Bidvertiser will now track those clicks and if they turn into valid leads will pay an additional conversion bonus to the publisher. If your site refers a number of high value leads this can lead to a substantial monthly bonus. In many cases this additional bonus can be higher than traditional CPC earnings.
- Revenue Generating Toolbar
The second new feature offered by Bidvertiser is the customized revenue generating toolbar. The BidVertiser Toolbar allows you to distribute your own customized toolbar to your website visitors and then earn money when your users use the toolbar for searching. The toolbar is fully customizable allowing logos to be changed, links to your home page added, useful tools, direct program links etc.
Bidvertizer pays you either in $100.00 increments by check or $10.00 increments by PayPal. They also do not require you to complete any tax information or provide a social security number.If you want you can download an example of the toolbar using the link below to try it out.
System Requirements
Windows Vista/XP/2000
Internet Explorer
Maximum customizability for the layout of your ads: BidVertiser gives you a simple point-and-click tool to help you customize the layout of the ads to fit your site's look and feel, in order to retain the high quality of your website. Bidvertizer also offers the opportunity to block unwanted ads. The reports provided by Bidvertiser are adequate but not outstanding. The only real problem is that it has been reported that they can be picky with who they accept into their program and can be quick to ban users whose websites show what may be perfectly valid fluctuating visitor behaviour. Although I have not heard any recent reports so they may have relaxed this policy somewhat. Click here to visit Bidvertiser's website where you can either sign up as a publisher (show peoples ads on your site) or as an advertiser (show your ads on other sites).
As an advertiser you can get $20 in free clicks by following this link: Bidvertiser Advertise and get $20 in free clicks.
Skimlinks' logo is "Unlock the cash in your content" and in this they do well. Skimlinks provides you with a highly automated way to monetize your entire content. They focus on two approaches, the first is the well known approach of monetizing phrases on your site by automatically converting them into affiliate links. The second is somewhat more unique in that Skimlinks can take regular links on your site and redirect them through their affiliate servers. A brief explanation of how this works is as follows:
- You add normal product links to your site.
- Your site looks normal to your readers with links showing exactly where they are going and it doesn't appear as if it is an advert.
- Skimlinks automatically turns this link into an equivalent affiliate link when a user clicks on it by redirecting briefly through the Skimlinks servers.
- Everytime a user clicks through a product link that Skimlinks is able to affiliate you earn a commission
Skimlinks allows you to:
- Add normal links to your content and have them automatically converted to an affiliate link on-click.
- No affiliate links to create or manage - Skimlinks does the work for you.
- No more network sign ups and approvals - you get instant access to 17,000 affiliate programs.
- Centralized reporting makes it easy to see which retailers your readers love.
- The scale of Skimlinks allows them to negotiate better commission rates for you over what you might be able to get by approaching the retailers directly.
4) B4PSAds.com
Granted they might not have the catchiest or easiest to remember URL but B4PSAds.com are a rising star when it comes to alternatives to Google Adsense and for those of you who lost out due to the AdBrite going bust debacle B4PSAds.com offers a reasonably good alternative there as well. B4PSAds.com are a complete advertising solution offering Pay Per Click (PPC) and Cost Per Action (CPA) to publishers and advertisers alike. It is very easy to get accepted with B4PSAds.com, they do not require a US social security number and approval is typically instantaneous after validating your email address. They support regular webpages as well as blogs and news feeds. Some of things B4PSAds offer include:
- CPA Bonuses - They pay you CPA bonuses for clicks that actually turn into actions for advertisers. This means you can earn income on both the click itself and resulting actions.
- Hands Free Operation - No longer will you have to search for the highest performing ads, nor will you have to pull ads when they run out. Every night, the B4PSAds system finds you the highest CPM yields, but then will also rotate to the next most profitable set of offers when advertisers end their campaigns or go over budget. This ultimately translates into more earning potential from your website traffic.
- Publisher Control - B4PSAds includes a full publisher control suite for you to control every aspect of your ads.
- Account Management - B4PSAds offers real time management of campaigns and provides details statistics and full accounting ledgers of historical and month to date (MTD) earnings and withdrawals.
- No Fees - There are no administration or network fees and it costs nothing to join.
- Monthly Contests - B4PSAds offers monthly cash prize contests for publishers.
- Privacy - In a move that may be critical to publishers in Europe B4PSAds does not collect or store any personal identifying information form users that visit your website. They collect only non-identifying information required for running the advertising campaigns.
A relative newcomer to the scene Infolinks specializes in In-Text Advertizing. That is it indexes your page looking for keywords and phrases that are not currently links and converts them into advertizing links. When a user places their mouse over the link a box opens up showing the ad. If they click on the link you get paid. It is very simple and works very effectively. The nice part is that you can use Infolinks to compliment an existing advertizing campaign on your website. For example you can show banner ads with Bidvertiser and show text links with Infolinks. Or you can even show text links with both Intellilinks and Infolinks together on the same page to maximize your revenue.
Infolinks claims to be leading the industry with the most relevant in-text advertising links and the highest revenue share - guaranteed. I am not sure how they 'guarantee' this but having used them for several months I can attest that their payouts are indeed good compared to other In-Text advertizing options.
In-Text advertizing is also useful if you have a site under construction. For example, suppose you have built a list of links but have not added all the links yet. Infolinks will parse your page and convert a lot of these into links. People then think these are part of your site, click on them and you get paid. The unobtrusiveness makes it a very attractive way to monetize your site without inundating and alienating your visitors with flashing banners, pop-ups etc.
Additionally Infolinks has just added a new feature called Related Tags. Related tags allow you to increase your clicks and earnings while adding valuable informational tags within your website's content. The Infolinks algorithm will choose the best keywords for the page and display them as tags within the Related Tags cloud. Just like In text ads, when a visitor hovers over the tags, an Infolinks advertisement bubble will appear, and each click will award your account additional revenues.
New features are being added by Infolinks all the time taking them beyond the traditional highlighted link advertiser. A recent addition is called the Search Widget add-on. In Infolinks' words it will "revolutionize how you monetize your websites". This new ad banner activates when a visitor originating from a Search Engine (Google, Bing or Yahoo) arrives at your site. The Search Widget appears for those visitors only, revealing ads related to their search. This can result in very high click thru rates.
Infolinks pays you either by bank wire, Automated Clearing House (ACH) ($400 minimum), or by PayPal ($50 minimum). Intriguingly they also offer payment via a prepaid Mastercard that will be refilled with your earnings each month. This is an interesting approach to payment and may be useful for international customers without PayPal or US Dollar bank accounts. However, the fees for this prepaid card appear to be fairly steep.
Infolinks' features:
- Quick and easy setup with no changes to your website.
- Ads are tightly integrated with your content - no additional space required.
- Free sign up with no commitments or risk.
- User triggered, less intrusive advertising that won't distract from your site's content.
- Highly relevant In-Text ads for your site visitors with record high conversion rates.
- Related tags.
Click here to visit Infolink's website and signup for an account to give them a try. As with most alternatives to adsense it is free and there is no obligation.6) Intellilinks
Intellilinks is a similar service to infolinks above but well worth trying. Intellilinks specializes in placing organic text links across an ever-growing network of websites in order to build rank and traffic for advertisers and increased revenue for publishers. Intellilinks focuses on providing cutting edge technology, while keeping the network seamless and secure to bring results to their clients and revenue to their publishers.
For publishers Intellilinks offers the following features:
Intellilinks allows you to place ads on your website using either their PHP script or their Wordpress plugin. You can have ads automatically approved or manually review them and place them yourself.
- Sell text links on your website for profit in a few easy steps.
- Extremely simple to setup, just install a plugin for your blog.
- As a publisher you have total control over which links are published on your site.
Intellilinks has no obligation and costs nothing to join or use. They split revenue 50:50 and make payments monthly by PayPal. Unlike almost every other adsense alternative Intellilinks have no minimum payout threshold. Whatever you earn during a month will be paid to you the following month via PayPal. Intellilinks also supports hosting ads on blog pages.
7) VigLink
VigLink is a direct competitor of Skimlinks. Indeed there are many examples on the web of people comparing the two services. Viglink works by monetizing key phrases on your website and converting them into affiliate links. Like Skimlinks they can take regular links on your site and redirect them through their servers. This is cool for things like Amazon links since it provides you with additional revenue above an beyond what you would get from the Amazon feed.
At the time of writing VigLink offer three key technologies:
- VigLink Convert - This takes simple link, for example to Amazon, that VigLink automatically converts for you into a link that earns you revenue.
- VigLink Insert - This takes phrases in your text and converts them into affiliate links. For example if you were discussing a specific product it would automatically add referral shopping links to that product for you. This service will also take URLs on your site and auto link them through Viglink so you earn additional revenue.
- VigLink Anywhere - This is for sharing links via Twitter, Facebook, email, or virtually anywhere else. You can create a simple short VigLink Anywhere link to earn revenue in all of your postings automatically.
VigLink have over 32,000 affiliated merchants, they pay monthly on a Net-60 schedule via PayPal or US Check on revenue share of between 25 and 50%. VigLink covers the PayPal fees. It is easy to get approved with account activation being instant upon verification of your email address. If you've had issues getting your site approved on other affiliate marketing programs give Viglink a try since they are typically much more relaxed when it comes to site approvals. There is no obligation, no costs and it's easy to remove from your site if you don't like it so go ahead and give VigLink a try.
8) Dynamic Oxygen
Dynamic Oxygen are a relative newcomer to the field having really only started at the end of 2010. However, they are growing quickly and offer an excellent alternative to the traditional Adsense route. Dynamic Oxygen enables publishers of all sizes to realize their full revenue potential! One of the nice things being that they are not focused purely on the high end, very high turnover publishers but instead cater to sites of all shapes, sizes and popularity. This also includes most international sites. Unlike many ad providers that only cater for US or European traffic, DynamicOxygen supports and pays out for worldwide traffic making it ideal for non-US based publishers.
In particular they feature:
- Benefit from targeted ads with High eCPM for your ENTIRE traffic.
- Get paid for all your international traffic.
- Enjoy unique ad formats not found elsewhere, such as Interstitials, Layer Ads, Peeler Ads, Anchor Ads, and more...
- Enjoy timely payments.
- Superb Support
Clicksor is one of the current leaders of the small publisher Adsense competition. They have payouts up to a market leading 85% and unlike a number of alternatives the cost per click bid values are high enough that you can earn a decent income. They are also, in my experience, much more tolerant than Google. Their terms and conditions suggest that you should only place one copy of their code on a page but as long as you only place a single pop-up or DHTML code on a page they seem happy to let you place many context sensitive ad blocks on a single site.
Clicksor also has a big advantage over a number of the lower ranked alternatives on this site in that their ads are truly context sensitive. Thus while you can provide keywords they have technology that will also show ads targeted to the content of your site. This means your visitors are exposed to ads of the same subject as they were searching for when they reached your site and thus vastly increases the click thru ratio and thus your sites earning potential. The context sensitive nature also saves you the hassle of having to specify keywords for all of your sites and decide in advance what people might be looking for.
The payment schedule with Clicksor is also much better geared to the small site owner. In any pay period in which your earnings exceed $50.00 ($20.00 with PayPal), payments are made either by check or instantly through PayPal ($20.00 minimum for PayPal). Revenue totaling less that $50 (PP $20) will rolled into the following period. The pay period is based on a 15 day schedule so you can get paid much more frequently. Clicksor also do not require a Social Security (SSN) or Individual Tax Identity Number (ITIN) to join and so while this 'technically' does not help US site owners with their tax liability it does make it much easier for non US citizens to join up and start earning revenue.
That said I have had several reports of late about Clicksor becoming more picky about who they accept and rejecting accounts. This is especially true of sites not based in the USA, Canada or the UK as well as sites not predominantly in English. I have also seen issues with their reporting of earnings, especially referrals not working properly. Thus I have moved them further down the list but I still recommend you to try them.
Advert wise Clicksor features:
Multiple formats available including text, image and animated ads.
- Text Links
- Image Ads
- Flash Ads
- Animation Ads
- Banners
- Pop unders
- Interstitial Ads (NEW)
- Dynamic (DHTML) highlighting
Click here to visit Clicksor's website and sign up for an account to try it out. There is no obligation and no fees ever. Note, once you start adding the advert code to your site it can take up to 24 hours for Clicksor to get up to speed as it were so initially you may see some ads that don't appear to be relevant. Once their contextual engine kicks in, however, the relevance quickly improves.10) Exit Junction
Ex AdBrite customers note: Clicksor is offering guaranteed account approval to anyone who had an active account with AdBrite when they went bust on Feb 1st 2013.
Exit Junction is relatively new and, I believe, a spin off from the now defunct Revenue Pilot. While Revenue Pilot has stopped running, however, Exit Junction is going from strength to strength. Exit Junction offers a unique approach to advertising that is compatible with all the other Ad Networks included Google Adsense. The key to Exit junction is that they focus on showing ads to users as they leave your site rather than as they arrive or as they browse. This approach offers you an additional way to monetize your traffic and also capture ad revenue from those that stumble upon your site from a search engine and then immediately leave.
By adding a small piece of Exit Junction code to the header section of your site users are shown an advert as they hit the back button. For example, if a user came to your site from a Google search and then immediately hit the back button to return to that search they would be shown an Exit Junction Ad in between your page and the Google search and you get paid for this impression. The ad is directly targeted to the search term that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. Hence Exit Junction is an ideal way of complimenting your existing ad services and so increasing your sites revenue without having to switch from your current ad provider.
Exit junction also covers all countries. You get paid for all traffic exiting you site regardless of its origin.
They offer fee free payout via Check or PayPal with earnings of as little as $25 on a monthly basis.
Click here to signup with Exit Junction for a free no obligation account.
You can find some suggestions on optimizing ad layouts here. Click here for an unofficial list of high paying keywords.. Click here for a comprehensive list of Google Adsense Alternatives. If you are a small business owner looking for cost effective alternatives to adwords then see this site. A list of the top 10 alternatives to Google Adwords is available here.
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