Today is June the 1st, and as we all know by now, Google has made it known that most MFA and arbitrager accounts would be closed by today. If your Adsense account has been closed, it can be painful, especially if you have been dependent on Adsense for so long.
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….