AdSense Alternatives

Placing advertisements be it link ads or banner ads is one of the easiest and quickest way to monetise your blog or niche site. You may already be using Google AdSense, one of the most popular advertising platform, also in our books one of the most transparent. However, there are other advertising platform out there that offer the same service. Let’s take a look at some of the other guys.

There are many ad networks, some of these names you may have already heard of. Google Adsense alone uses it’s own Google AdWords. There is Quantcast, Rocket Fuel, Criteo, Wisemedia Overseas, RadiumOne, AdRoll.com, MediaMath, Amazon.com, Turn, Adroll Fourth Seat, Invite for ATT, ValueClick, Invite Media, A&N Media, Vizury, The Trade Desk, Struq, Accordant Media, Ziff Davis, Spiceworks, ShareThis, NowSpots, Media Forum, Keppler Group, EchoSearch, Dotomi, Dentsu, DataXu, Veruta, Sojern, Sstillery, Adara Media, the list can go on and on. These are ad networks that works with Google AdSense which just goes to show how big the advertising market is.

As part of our journey into the online business world, monetizing our content and website plays a big role. We owe it to ourselves to find out what if any are the alternatives to Google AdSense. A quick search online yields quite a number of useful resources. Here is what we found:

Adsense Alternatives Resources

In his article, Jimmy Atkinson of MonetizePros lists 5 Ad Networks to use in conjunction with Google AdSense. These are:

1. Media.net run by Yahoo!/Bing is a contextual ad network that presents a list of relevant topics.
2. Infolinks displays ads within your content, you see this when you hover your mouse over certain keywords. They also do ads that fill the space on either side of your content if you have a fixed width.
3. Outbrain is a contextual and referral ad network that displays “sponsored content”, a bunch of links that goes to articles on different websites, we have seen this in a lot of news networks.
4. Undertone uses ‘pop-up’ ads that overlays your sites content.
5. Finally Google AdSense it self

For the full article click here.

An article on hongkiat.com pulls up over 10 Google Adsense Alternatives and these are

1. Chitika is a search query driven ad network that presents ads based on keywords used on search engine to find your site.
2. Yahoo Bing Network’s contextual ad engine, Media.net (this was mentioned in the previous section)
3. Kontera uses in-content keyword advertising, much like Infolinks
4. Clicksor offers a variety of different ad types including text links and in content ads similar to Kontera and Infolinks.
5. Vibrant Media offering in content or in text ads and relevant image ads. The differentiate by offering animated video and vibrant graphics inside the pop-ups and images ads.
6. AdSide offers ad banners with text and thumbnails on left side of each row.
7. Infolinks mentioned previously.
8. LinkWorth offers text links, hosted content ads, banner ads, paid blog reviews, in-text ads, multi-URL rotating ads and directory submission.
9. Intellilinks as the name suggest offers in-text (in content) ads and standard related text links.
10. Bidvertiser offers text link ads boxes
11. Qadabra offers slider ads with rich media

For the full article click here (includes publisher sign up page links, for some, these are hard to find and a summary table for quick comparison)

Servando Silva on Stream SEO, lists 10 Best Google AdSense Alternatives with updates for 2014 by striking out Adbrite from the list since its demise, some position changes and inclusion of affiliate networks, so here is a quick list he recommends:

1. Affiliate Marketing, Servando included this as the top earner if executed properly. These are served by Affiliate Networks such as Commission Junction, ClickBank and ShareaSale
2. Chitika mentioned previously
3. Adversal offers multiple ad formats including pop ups and full page banners
4. Clicksor, mentioned above
5. Text Link Ads now Matomy SEO
6. BuySellAds offers a marketplace for selling of ad spaces on your website and for potential buyers to buy those spaces
7. Amazon Associates, affiliate network for the popular retailer
8. Kontera mentioned above
9. Infolinks, mentioned above

For the full article click here.

Here is one by Ross Walker in his article also titled the Top 10 Alternatives to Google Adsense.

1. Chitika mentioned above
2. Bidvertiser mentioned above
3. Skimlinks offers the option of turning normal product links into affiliate links by redirecting it through their server. It also offers product showcases and in text (in content) ads.
4. B4PSAds.com
5. Infolinks mentioned above
6. Intellilinks mentioned above
7. Dynamic Oxygen offers anchor ads (bottom of page), cursor ads, floating ads, layer ads, message ads, pop-up, pop-under ads and sky ads (top of page)
8. Clicksor mentioned above
9. Exit Junction
10. Kontera mentioned above

For the full article click here.

Finally, just to finish off, another Top 10 Google Adsense Alternatives article by Shakila on TechMell lists the following, (you can probably guess that most of these are repeats from previous lists):

1. BuySellAds mentioned above
2. Infolinks mentioned above
3. Chitika mentioned above
4. Tribal Fusion offers Cost Per Impression (CPM) ads that pays for displaying as oppose to Cost Per Click (CPC) that only pays when someone clicks on the links.
5. Clicksor mentioned above
6. Kontera mentioned above
7. Adbrite (demised)
8. Bidvertiser mentioned above
9. iSocket is another marketplace to buy and sell ads
10. Adversal mentioned above

Top 20 Ad Networks

So here is what we gathered. Based on the articles and resources published online we can safely say that there are indeed plenty of Google AdSense alternatives.

To summarise, in no particular order, here are the 20 most popular ad networks out there:

1. Media.net
2. Infolinks
3. Outbrain
4. Undertone
5. Chitika
6. Kontera
7. Clicksor
8. Vibrant Media
9. AdSide
10. LinkWorth
11. Intellilinks
12. Bidvertiser
13. Qadabra
14. Adversal
15. Matomy SEO
16. BuySellAds
17. Skimlinks
18. B4PSAds.com
19. Dynamic Oxygen
20. Exit Junction

Where do I sign up

For most of these networks, look under the Publishers section. That’s you, being the publisher of content on your blog or niche site and the publisher of the advertisement. From there look for a sign up button to access their sign up form.

Who do I sign up with

In our opinion, appearance matters, so when looking for an Ad platform to sign-up, ask yourself what is the first impression you get when opening the site. Having looked at all the sites on the list, some are obviously better than others on presentation and the quality of the information it provides. Next, look at the demo ads and list of existing advertisers and publishers. Visit the publishers on their list to check out of the ads are displayed as they should.

We use Google’s AdSense ourselves and like the console where it’s pretty much real time, showing earnings of the days and all the possible reporting options to gauge the performance of each ad and type, hence the transparency we mentioned earlier. We felt this should be available as a minimum on other platforms. So, take your time to read more about these publishers and find the right fit for you.

Final Thoughts

After looking into the different options out there to monetise our websites, we felt there is certainly scope for us to explore and try out these networks. This is not to say that we would recommend any of these to our reader over Google AdSense as we have no real experience to speak of, yet.

If you have used any of these other platforms, please do share your experience with us.