A few days ago, Google announced that they would stop the Adsense Referral program for webmasters from outside the North America, Latin America, and Japan. Darren Rowse had some strong views on this, but you really can’t fault him. A similar view here. Not only have they changed the payment scheme, but they have excluded referrers from outside certain geographic locations. So it’s really not where your traffic is from, its where you are – your physical location.

If I were to give my view on this, I’d say it’s a sign that Google is limiting the Adsense program for the first time in its history, and there could be more “news” to come in 2008. It’s not so much the reasoning, it’s more because they really don’t want any more new publishers!

By limiting the referrals to certain geographic locations, they hope to start reducing the rate of new signups per day. I think the allowed regions they specify are just a formality. They are just trying to say they want to start reducing the number of publishers they have. Whether this will significantly reduce the rate of new signups or not, I do believe more changes could happen in 2008, along similar lines.

Many people have already noticed Google dragging their feet when it comes to approving new applications; it used to take a few days, now it may take weeks, or even never. The glut of publishers is taking its toll. So what does this all mean? Time to actually start giving the other ad networks a decent chance. Here’s but three; there are in fact a few dozen decent ones.

Link units are some of the more useful Adsense ad formats available. It usually works best in the sidebar under/above your page navigation links, in the subheader, or the bottom of a page. Previously, you could only have 1 link unit on a page, so that restricted publishers to just choosing one spot and putting it up there.

According to the oft quoted pic from the Adsense page, the best Adsense places are the orange and red zones. I’ve added the blue lines to show where are the usual/sensible places for link units. Now that 3 units are allowed, its easier to experiment.

Another piece of news is this handy Adsense preview tool by the Digital Inspiration author, Amit Agarwal. It’s useful to find out if a keyword/niche will also be profitable in Adsense by having publishers bidding and advertising on the particular keyword. If the entered keyword only generates a few adverts, it may indicate a lack of Adwords publishers for this keyword. So if you’re hoping to monetize with Adsense, it would be better to find another keyword that will generate ads.

The proper way to make money online is not to depend on Adsense since it isn’t a stable way to earn money, even if you are making a good amount with it. Adsense is just too flaky. Most internet marketers will tell you that the real money is in selling stuff, and not earning pennies per click.

But contextual CPC ad models are the easiest monetization models to implement on almost any site, which is why they remain so popular. There are some workable alternatives to Adsense, that copy their model and perform quite well in return. But besides contextual CPC ads, there are many other ways to monetize your site.

Here are some of the current “best” alternatives to Adsense:

Yahoo Publisher Network

The most promising of the lot, but still taking a long time to go international (currently limited to US publishers). When they do, they’ll have no shortage of willing and eager webmasters who would do anything to get on board.

Yahoo Publisher Network looks like a carbon copy of Adsense, and it really is, but there are big differences.

• It pays a lot more than Adsense on the whole. About 4-8 times more on average.
• It takes a month to get approved. Adsense takes a couple of days.
• Your site needs to be in English and get US traffic. No US traffic, no money.
• Relevance of ads is not good, Adsense does a much better job. Of course, this is directly related to the number of publishers that YPN has. It should get better over time, provided YPN knows how to deal with “Made for YPN” sites.
• Pays through check or PayPal, which might be more convenient…as long as you don’t face the infamous PayPal problems. Based on PayPal’s infamous track record, I wouldn’t be too overjoyed over this, would you?
• You’ll face a higher risk of termination from YPN rather than from Adsense. YPN is no knightly saviour either. If your ads don’t convert (make sales for the advertisers), you’d either get banned or be asked to take them down. Even a big publisher like Shoemoney was asked to take his YPN ads down when they didnt convert well enough, and I’m currently hearing a lot of YPN publishers saying they got banned from YPN.
• You get to put YPN ads in RSS feeds. Google will likely get round to it sooner or later, with their acquisition of FeedBurner recently; currently, YPN is the leader with this technology, while Google’s is still in beta.

Chitika

Chitika actually allows you to pick your own products and display the ads for them in their eMiniMalls program, unlike other ad systems. Most of Chitika’s inventory comes from Amazon, so you should find at least a few suitable products to promote. Chitika has been praised by almost all top bloggers for being innovative and effective. It really functions like an online store which you can load up into your site or blog and have it displaying the exact products you want shown.

• Chitika’s ad appearance can be configured easily, if you know some HTML.
• Search for a product at their website, and serve it as an ad by looking for this line in the code: ch_queries, and then add the name of the product there.
• For high traffic sites, Chitika really pays off, especially if you added in Chitika’s Shoplinks into your site. These are ads showing a whole range of niche products to sell, and not just a few.

AuctionAds

This one has got me excited for a number of reasons. It’s getting better over time, and is great for product sales sites. I’ll post a deeper review of AuctionAds in the future, once my testings get conclusive.

• Getting the ads up is simple, and even the sign up process is so simple, your grandma could sell stuff in minutes
• Displays Ebay auctions as ads on your site. The ads are supposed to be targeted towards your content, but usually they are not quite so targeted… This is still the number one shortcoming of AuctionAds, but when this gets better, so will your earnings!
• No limit to the number of ads you want to display on your site. That’s great news.
• Yeah, it pays through PayPal (of course), with a $10 minimum payout level.
• You earn money whenever someone buys an Ebay item from your link. Since Ebay has so many items on sale, you should get some targeted inventory to promote.

These are in my opinion, the top three Adsense alternatives. True, there might be Adbrite or Text Link Ads, or Clickbank Ads, but these are beyond the scope of this post, although it’s probably worthwhile to have a working knowledge of them early on; just in case….