The Top 10 Alternatives to Google Adsense

The Top 10 Alternatives to Google Adsense

 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 ones (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. AdBrite Bidvertiser Chitika Infolinks / Intellilinks Pocket Cents Kontera Clicksor Exit Junction Dynamic Oxygen AdBull Note: The descriptions are based on personal experience and do not represent any form of endorsement.

1) AdBrite

AdBrite, is currently one of the best alternatives there is to Google's adsense. While they do not offer the same large selection of ad formats that Clicksor and Google Adsense provide you they do offer the most commonly used ones. In addition they offer inline page links with have some great click through ratios as well as interstitial full page ads which offer an excellent way to monetize all traffic to your site not just traffic that clicks on your ads. Their payouts are also very competitive. They have more relaxed terms and conditions than Adsense and are much more accepting of smaller publishers including bloggers.

If you're a publisher, use AdBrite to set your own ad rates, and approve or reject every ad that's purchased for your site or just have AdBrite auto accept ever ad. AdBrite enables you to instantly sell ads to your visitors via a "Your Ad Here" link, in addition to selling through AdBrite's marketplace and sales team.

Revenue is typically split 75/25 in your favor. Through a small snippet of HTML placed on your site, they handle serving, scheduling, billing, customer service, and sales. About half of AdBrite's sales are generated from the marketplace and sales team, while the other half are generated from users clicking "Your Ad Here" on your website.

While AdBrite can provide publishers with more revenue and better ads than traditional ad networks such as Google AdSense, they work fine along-side them as a way for you to generate additional ad revenue by selling ads directly to your visitors -- something the other ad systems don't do.  Ad Brite also lets you select your own minimum bid prices and give you the option of showing an alternative ad service such as Clicksor when bid prices fall below your minimum.

If you're using AdBrite on your website you also have the option to turn off AdBrite's "run-of-network ads" and AdBrite will only display ads that have been approved by you allowing you to prevent competitors ads being shown on your site. If you have no ads running, AdBrite will display nothing but "Your Ad Here" or your alternative ad provider.

Note, from my experiences it can take a day or so from when you signup with AdBrite and put their code on your website to actually start seeing relevant ads showing up. So if you see the message "Advertize on this site" just be patient and give it a day or so and you should start seeing relevant ads showing up.

AdBrite also accepts Blogs and Bloggers as sites so if you are fed up with other programs turning you down because their terms and conditions restrict Blogs try AdBrite.

2) Bidvertiser

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.

If you want you can download an example of the toolbar using the link below to try it out.

Includes Uninstaller System Requirements Windows Vista/XP/2000 Other versions: Internet Explorer

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.

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.

 

3) Chitika

Chitika - The Leader in Impulse Merchandising
Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka) was founded in 2003 and is the industry's leading impulse merchandising company. Chitika was founded in May 2003 and is based in Massachusetts. Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka) helps web publishers generate revenue using innovative publisher-side advertising and merchandising solutions and services.

Chitika began, not as a stand alone advertising solution but instead as way to compliment 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 impulse marketing in the form of Premium Ad Units (eMinimalls).

Chitika has now progressed, however, into a fully fledged advertizer service. The eMinimalls initially evolved into advertizing units that would show adverts based on what people searched for to get to your site. 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. For example you could use it to compliment another advertizers service. E.g. you could show Clicksor context sensitive ads on your site and then compliment these with Chitika's search traffic oriented ads.

However, Chitika now goes beyond this, also offering what are termed premium ads. Chitika uses it custom "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 you can have it show an alternative ad provider, such as adsense, or you can just have it collapse away to show nothing.

Recently added new features from Chitika include:

• List Unit
  
  The Chitika List Unit (CLU) is a powerful extension of the MPU which automatically adjusts its height, ensuring no ugly white-space and thus a cleaner user experience. These can also be referred to as rotating ads. Such units really come into their own on devices such as iPads which support dynamically rotating screens. With the use of a rotating CLU you can have your ad automatically adjust to fill all the space on the screen. This also draws the users eye to the ads and makes it more likely for them to click on one.
   
• Mobile Code
  Adverts specifically designed to be shown on  mobile content.
   
• Pay per call Ads
  These ads are 'action based' ads which have a very high payout of between $2 and $20 per action. For local ads they greatly increase action rates since local viewers are more likely to click these ads because it will put them in direct contact with the advertiser.

Chitika's search based advert units allow you to display targeted products based on what people searched for to get to your page and you get paid for clicks. Chitika offers payment by PayPal (with a $10 minimum) or via Check (with a $50 minimum).

Click here to visit Chitika's website and sign up today.

4) Infolinks / Intellilinks

I list both Infolinks and Intellilinks together here since they offer very similar services.

Infolinks

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 AdBrite or Bidvertiser and show text links with Infolinks. Or you can even show text links with both AdBrite 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.

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:

• 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 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.

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.

Click here to visit Intellilinks website and signup for an account and give them a try.

5) Pocket Cents

A relative new comer to the field is Pocket Cents. Pocket Cents has been built from the ground up as a Click Banner provider. Specializing in automatic focus on local markets Pocket Cents offers an intriguing alternative to adsense/adwords. While unlikely to replace your entire creative portfolio, Pocket Cents does off an attractive alternative for banner ads. It could also act as a good alternative ad provider for backfill from one of the larger networks.

Pocket Cents' claim is that:

"Location based advertisements generate precisely targeted traffic to your website increasing internet sales and decreasing advertising costs."

It remains to be seen how effective this will ultimately be but the idea, from a publishers perspective is that it gives you a higher click through rate and therefore better earnings from CPC ads. They also offer a flat rate on clicks meaning as a publisher increasing your website revenue simply means optimizing clicks. Experience to date though shows that payouts per click can be VERY good so it is definitely worth a try. The following shows an example banner ad from Pocket Cents.

Click here to visit Pocket Cents and sign up for a no obligation account today.

6) Kontera

Kontera works in a similar way to Infolinks above, however, they have been around for much longer. Traditionally it was hard to get accepted by Kontera but they seem to have relaxed their restrictions of late. This is especially true for website publishers and affiliate marketers that do not have high daily page impressions.

Kontera is extremely easy to use. You simply add a few lines of code to the end of your webpage and within 24 hours additionally links start showing up on your page that serve Kontera Ads. While this service does not provide you with a complete replacement for all your ads, since they do not provide banner creatives etc., it does provide an additional way to increase the revenue your site can generate. The links are context sensitive and relevant so click through ratios can be very high for well designed sites.

Some of the features offered by Kontera:

• The best payout in the business.
• Premium ads with market-leading CPC.
• Record high CTRs.
• The best relevancy and user experience.
• Works within your text � no extra space required.
• Takes only a minute to set up.

Kontera is nice because it is simply Plug and Play and it provides an additional revenue stream for your website. It does not require any additional space or layout considerations since it integrated directly with your text. In my opinion the inline text ads also look smarter than a lot of other offerings.

In May 2011 Kontera started rolling out additional features designed to maximize revenue and value for publishers. These represent extensions of what Kontera do today and are intended to deliver better revenue and value publishers. The Retargeting offering is part of Kontera's Audience Program and leverages their unique ability to understand and assess user interest via a semantic engine designed to yield greater revenues for publishers. Kontera's Retargeting presents a unique opportunity for publishers to earn additional revenues from Kontera ads that they already serve. Kontera finds interested consumers on publisher sites and qualifies their interest by leveraging their Synapse technology. When they see these users elsewhere on the web they show them relevant banners and share the revenues with the publisher where the user first expressed interest.

The value add for the publisher includes:

1) Additional revenue (approximately 10-20% more on average once the entire Audience Program is fully operational)
2) No technical requirements
3) No change to user experience
4) Ability to participate in an exciting and novel growth area in advertising

Kontera provides payment by PayPal with a $50 minimum payout.
Click here to visit Kontera's website and sign up for a no obligation publisher account.
7) Clicksor

Clicksor is one of the current leaders of the small publisher Adsense competition. They have payouts upto 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 tollerant 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 online stats provided by Clicksor are not perfect but they are enough for you to keep track of the trends with your site. They also allow you to add as many sites / domains as you want under a single account. You also only need the root page of your site approved. Once this is done you can place ads on all of your sub pages.

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.

8) Exit Junction

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.

9) 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

DynamicOxygen provide payment via PayPal, Check or Wire Transfer with $50 minimum payouts. You can sign up for a no obligation, risk free account and give DynamicOxygen a try by following this link.

10) AdBull

The final service worth looking at as an alternative to Google Adsense is AdBull. AdBull is relatively easy to sign up for an your account will be active immediately. It will still be reviewed for formal acceptance but this gives you a chance to show the person doing the review what the ads will look like on your site making your chances of being accepted much much higher. AdBull offer a range of services mostly similar to that offered by the other services described here. This includes CPC, CPM and CTR. Current Click Thru Rates run about 3-5% which puts them on the high side of most services. CPMs run around $1.00 to $1.50 per 1000 page loads allowing you to make a substantial amount of money hosting your site's ads through AdBull. Some of the benefits of AdBull include:

• Adds to existing revenue
• No delayed page loads - we are the last item to load
• Ads are relevant to your site's content
• Ad only appears once every 12 hours, per unique visitor
• Patented "Cursor Ad Unit"

One of the most interesting features of AdBull is their patented cursor ad unit which appears to be unique on the web at present. From AdBull's own description: "AdBull is the only patented, cursor ad unit on the internet. AdBull gently fades in near the users cursor for 8-10 seconds, deploying an ad relevant to your site's content, thus increasing CTRs. Once the ad fades out, the cursor returns to its normal state and the ad will not appear again for 12 hours for that unique visitor." This represents a a new way to attract your visitors attention to your ads without being overly intrusive.

The fact that ads are focused to individual visitors means your visitors are not presented with the same ad on every page of your site they visit so increasing the Click Thru Rates that you are likely to see. You can sign up for a no-obligation publishers account by following this AdBull link.

---

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.

Share this

Safdar Hussain