Whenever someone talks about monetization, invariably, the first
thing that pops up into the mind is Google AdSense. And while there’s
nothing particularly wrong with that—it is, after all, the world’s
largest ad network, but to sit on an assumption that AdSense can’t be
outdone by anyone isn’t wise.
The ad tech industry is highly disruptive and it wouldn’t be a
stretch to say that Google has competitors who give them a good run for
their money.
It may take a lot of hit and trial to figure out which ad network, or
even combination of ad networks, generate the highest revenue for you,
but when you finally do figure it out—it would have been well worth the
effort.
Here are a few networks that you must check out in 2015.
Adsterra is one of the fastest growing premium ad networks and
currently serves over 10 billion geo-targeted ad impression each
month. They support publishers from all verticals and guarantee 100%
monetization of their ad inventory.
Adsterra offers a vast variety of effective ad formats in all popular
sizes for both web and mobile including: Pushup, interstitial, display
banners, popunders, sliders, and direct links. Each campaign is tested
hourly through an automated verification software designed by GeoEdge,
ensuring the highest possible ad quality and security.
Publishers also enjoy on-time payments made bi-weekly via major
payment systems, as well as a personal account manager and real-time
statistics.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA
Minimum traffic: 300,000
Revcontent is one of the biggest content recommendation platforms on
the internet, currently serving 100 billion content recommendations a
month across the globe with a growth rate of 900% last year.
Revcontent is notoriously difficult to join as it rejects almost 98%
of websites that apply – focusing more on the quality of its publisher
network rather than the quantity. This strategy has helped Revcontent
generate higher revenues, better engagement rates, and loyal audiences
for their partners.
As part of product improvement efforts, they’ve just launched
Revcontent v2, which features an intuitive user interface that enables
transparent reporting and easier customization of widgets.
Model: CPC
Minimum traffic: N/A
Traditional banner ads have one big problem that results in big
revenue losses: many users either consciously or subconsciously ignore
them because ads are usually viewed as an intrusion.
Infolinks is a great ad network that gets around this problem by
offering an innovative set of free to use and profitable ad units:
InFold (overlay ads), InText (text links ads), InTag (tag cloud ads),
InFrame (banner ads in margins and frames) and InScreen (smart
interstitial ads). That result in better SEO, less intrusion to your
users, increased relevance and better space utilization.
Infolinks generate high monthly revenue for over 200,000 publishers
in more than 130 countries today, and they work with the biggest
advertisers in the world such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Ebay.
Their platform is very simple to integrate into your site and is open to
any publisher, with no setup fees and no minimum requirements for page
views or visitors.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV, CPI, Auction
Minimum traffic: None
Media.net serves
ads from the Yahoo! Bing contextual ad network, which comprises of a
large pool of national and local advertisers, ensuring a 100% fill rate
across all verticals and ad formats.
Some of Media.net’s publishers include Forbes, Elle, Reuters,
Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and more. The network supports standard IAB sizes
and has access to high quality ads from all major DSPs.
In addition to display units, Media.net also supports desktop interstitial, in-content native, and mobile docked ads.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA
Minimum traffic: None
AdBlade is a premium, brand-safe ad network with a focus on quality
over quantity. Fox News, Hearst Corporation, Yahoo!, and ABC are among
the 1,000 or so publishers that comprise the network. AdBlade supports
standard IAB units, as well as proprietary NewsBullets® units that claim
to deliver up to 3x better performance.
Model: CPM, CPC
Minimum traffic: 500,000 monthly impressions
Revenue Hits uses contextual and geo-targeted ad serving technology
to deliver better revenue for their publishers across different types of
properties such as websites, mobile sites, add-ons, widgets, toolbar,
and many more.
It serves over two billion ad impressions each day with a promise of 100% fill rate across all geographic regions.
Other than display ads, Revenue Hits also lets publishers monetize
their website using text ads, pop ups, apps, widgets, XML feeds, and
other custom formats.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV, Auction
Minimum traffic: None
Undertone specializes in providing several high-impact ad formats in
addition to standard IAB—including IAB rising stars, several video
formats, and its own range of flagship display formats designed for
higher user engagement.
This coupled with the fact that many of Undertone’s proprietary ad
units use your ad inventory in non-traditional ways, ensuring there’s no
cannibalization of existing ad products, means that Undertone can offer
CPMs 100%-1500% higher than traditional display ads.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV
Minimum traffic: 500,000
Though your mileage may vary, Bidvertiser is an ad network with an
interesting monetization model: In addition to earning money for each ad
that is clicked, the publisher also earns additional revenue when the
click leads to a conversion (i.e. sale) for the advertiser.
BidVertiser supports multiple ad formats including banners,
skyscrapers, rectangles, and mobile. You can use the provided
point-and-click tool to customize the layout of these units to match
your website’s look.
A bidding system ensures that publishers always get the highest
possible revenue from each unit. Using the reporting interface, you can
easily monitor your ads performance, clicks, click-through rate, and the
total amount you’ve earned.
Model: CPM, CPC
Minimum traffic: None
Vibrant Media is another ad network that offers specialty ad formats
such as in-text, in-image, lightbox, storyboard, mosaic, and brand
canvas in addition to the standard IAB display ad units.
Depending on your needs, you can choose to use Vibrant Media as your
primary display ad network or you can employ their native ad solutions
to increase revenue without changing your existing ad configuration
Ads are responsive so they can be delivered across multiple platforms seamlessly.
Model: CPM, CPC
Minimum traffic: None
Clicksor serves over 900 million ad impressions on over 100,000
specialized websites that comprise its publisher network. In addition to
regular banner ads, Clicksor also offers in-text ads, rich media,
interstitials, and pop-unders as alternative ad formats.
Under the hood, Clicksor scans the text on your website and serves
ads using the latest contextual technology, resulting in a higher
click-through rate.
Installation is a breeze with Clicksor’s plugin for Blogger,
WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla that you just need to download and
activate to get going.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV, CPI
Minimum traffic: None
Advertising.com, is the technology, data and insights arm of AOL
Advertising. It has relationships with 70+ of comScore’s Top 100
ad-supported sites, with a publisher network spanning 30+ content
verticals and monetizes nearly 2 billion ad impressions per day on
average.
If you’re looking for a specific set of advertisers, Advertising.com
offers ad blocks by advertiser, industry, media, and category to ensure
the best fit for your site.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA
Minimum traffic: 300,000 monthly impressions
Creafi Online Media serves over 300 million ad impressions daily and
hinges its USP on advanced audience targeting methodologies such as
behavioral targeting, retargeting, and semantic targeting.
When advertisers can customize who sees their ads based on behavior
and context using these tools, ad performance shoots up and it’s a
win-win for both them and the publishers. To publishers, Creafi offers
multiple ad formats and revenue streams and a greater degree of control
over ad inventory.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV
Minimum traffic: 1,000,000
Epom Market is a cross-platform ad network associated with leading
advertisers and publishers in over 40 countries across 15 verticals. The
network serves 13 billion ad impressions reaches an audience of 320
million unique monthly visitors per month.
It offers category-targeted, mobile, and local ads to ensure better
user targeting, which lead to higher eCPM rates. In addition to standard
banner ads, Epom also supports footer, in-text, and mobile-specific ad
units.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, Auction
Minimum traffic: 500,000
Media Nexus is an ad network that works with fortune 500 and global brands, with some being exclusive to their network.
This means that ads served by the network are usually of high quality
and add to a user’s experience (instead of taking away from it).
The network serves six distinct verticals and offers publishers
monthly payments, a dedicated account manager, high eCPMs, and 100% fill
rates.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV
Minimum traffic: 5,000,000
Haxhax is a premium, brand-safe private marketplace with over 100
handpicked premium publishers serving video, rich media, mobile and
traditional display. Haxhax provides comprehensive reporting,
multi-screen ad servicing, and an auto-invoicing system to get your
payouts on time.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV, Auction
Minimum traffic: 500,000
PropellerAds support banner ads in all standard sizes such as 728×90,
300×250, 160×600, 120×600, and more apart from onclick and in-banner
video ad formats. If the ads are positioned strategically, you can
expect CPMs as much as 1-2$ for US and UK inventory.
They have 3,000 active campaigns worldwide and perform manual checks
to remove all unsafe and suspicious advertisers—ensuring high ad
quality.
Publishers get the benefit of a 100% monetized inventory, in-time
payouts, a personal account manager, and detailed real-time reporting.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA
Minimum traffic: None
An ad network that specifically caters to bloggers, BlogAds
represents thousands of premier blogs such as PerezHilton, DailyKos,
Wonkette and Cute Overload. Set up is easy and you can manage multiple
sites from one account.
BlogAds offers a high level of control over your advertising by
letting you determine which ad sizes to offer, set your own prices,
customize the appearance of ads, and accept or reject ads.
There are no monthly fees; instead, BlogAds keep 14% of sales made to
your readers. Most common IAB ad sizes are supported. It’s worth a try
if you’re a blogger who wants to try an alternative to AdSense.
Model: CPC, CPA
Minimum traffic: None
PulsePoint is an ad network that processes 110 billion ad
transactions each month across its platform. They’re big on data-driven
ad optimization—crunching about 20TB of it every day.
Their proprietary contextual ensures better ad targeting and increase
relevance, giving publishers the opportunity to monetize impressions
buyers would normally overlook. There are no sign up fees or hidden
costs.
Model: CPM
Minimum traffic: None
Conversant runs campaigns for 5,000+ brands every month, increasing
the chances of finding an ideal fit for all content verticals. A
real-time publisher interface offers fully transparent campaign
reporting along with activity and revenue data.
Their cross-platform advertising solutions ensure that publishers are able to maximize their revenue from mobile devices.
In addition to standard display, they offer ads in multiple other
formats such as in-text rollovers, static, rich media, banners, over the
page and more.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA
Minimum traffic: None
AdCash is one of the foremost advertising networks and provides
high-quality ads from leading brands and exclusive pricing models
designed to effectively monetize their online content and increase
revenue.
AdCash supports all industry standard as well as exclusive display
formats such as site under, footer, interstitial, slide-in, background,
and more. It has over 1,000 ad campaigns running on its platform—the big
inventory means better ad targeting.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA
Minimum traffic: None
A popular alternative to AdSense, Chitika has over 350,000 publishers
on its network and serves over four billion ads per month, making it
one of the largest ad networks in the world if you were to go by those
metrics.
Its proprietary targeting and optimization technology uses
programmatic buying to serve precisely the right ad, at the right time.
The approval process for new publishers is usually pretty
straightforward and takes little time.
Model: CPC
Minimum traffic: None
The CPM rates of Tribal Fusion is amongst the highest in the industry
and they offer reliable payments, dedicated account manager, real-time
reporting, and free ad-serving technology.
You can control the content of ads by blocking ad categories (i.e.
gambling, religious, political, alcohol, flashing, warning, etc.) or by
specific advertiser domain names.
Based on content of the website, Tribal Fusion’s server finds the
best advertiser-audience fit in real-time, benefitting both the
advertiser and the publisher.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV
Minimum traffic: 500,000
WWW Promoter offers publishers high fill rates, competitive CPMs,
advanced targeting, and efficient ad serving using its proprietary ad
serving technology.
They focus on building a network that comprises of trusted brands and
advertisers, eliminating the possibility of low-quality ads being
served. The inhouse ad platform has a reporting tool that helps
publishers track their CPMs in real-time.
If someone told you that ad size is not an important factor, they are wrong. It’s one of the 3 or 4 most important ones.
