AdSense is probably the easiest way to generate revenue with your website I know it’s making me a fantastic amount of money but it’s certainly not the only way you can make money using contextualized advertising. At the beginning of 2007, Google changed its Terms of Service to allow publishers to place other contextualized ad systems on the same pages as AdSense units. There’s just one restriction: those other systems’ ads can’t look like AdSense units. That still leaves you a huge range of possibilities. In this chapter, I’m going to look at some of the other programs that you could use either instead of AdSense or as well as AdSense. I’ll explain how they work and how you can make them work with AdSense.
19.1 Kontera Making Your Words Pay
Kontera (Kontera.com) is a great way to make extra revenue. Instead of putting ad units on your site, like AdSense does, Kontera highlights particular keywords in your text and brings up an ad when the user mouses over them. The words are marked out from regular links by an underline and a second dotted line, and you can change the colors of the text and the links. For some of the biggest publishers, the ad inventory even includes some very highearning video ads.
I use Kontera on my personal blog at JoelComm.com and I’ve been pretty impressed with the results. The ads are fun to bring up, they’re relevant and they’re totally unobtrusive. But like AdSense, you will need to play with them to maximize your revenues. There are so many different factors that affect your incomes with Kontera, such as which keywords you want highlighted, where you want those words to appear on the page and which colors to choose for the best results, that it took me some time to figure out all of the best combinations. It also took me a few phone calls directly to the people who’d created it to get an idea of what happens behind the scenes of the program so that I can maximize my income.
The key issues are the number of links you should place on your Web pages, the color of the links and how those links are distributed. The first issue is pretty simple. Kontera lets you place up to six ad links on each page and recommends that you take all of them. I don’t see any reason to argue with that. In general, your best strategy when building a website that earns income through advertising is to keep the pages relatively short and focused on just one topic. That will keep your ads relevant. If you’re following that strategy, then it’s unlikely that your page is going to look overstuffed with Kontera’s ads. You’ll probably find no more than three or four on a page, and because they only appear as links they won’t distract the user.
The color of the links is a tougher question. Usually, it’s best to choose a different color to the one you’ve used for your AdSense units. That’s because Google and Kontera tend to pick up on different keywords. Offering different links in different colors helps to emphasize that variety and lets Kontera’s links stand out. If you’re thinking that the goal of optimization is to blend the ads into your site, you’re right. But these links are going to be embedded in your content. They’re also going to be doubleunderlined so that they’ll look different anyway. You want people to see them and to place their mouse over them. You could try using blue as your link color if you want.
I use them sometimes on my blog. But I suspect that if you tested different colors, you might well find that a tone that matches your site’s design will give you better results. Testing is going to be key. Making sure that the ads appear in the best locations on the page is easy to do but might require a little work. For the most part, Kontera’s software should distribute the ads fairly evenly across the page. But if you want to make sure that you don’t get any ads in particular places on the page, you can use Zone Tags.
These simply tell Kontera: “No ads here please.” To define certain text areas as offlimit simply add the line: before the text, and the tag: at the end. If that sounds to you like AdSense’s Section Targeting, you’re on the right track. But Kontera’s filters aren’t exactly the same as Section Targeting. Placing these filter tags won’t prevent Kontera’s contextualization engine from checking that section for keywords. The contents of that section will still be used to assess the meaning of the Web page. Kontera just won’t place ads on any keywords it finds there. While that’s useful for keeping ads away from the bottom of the page, the sidebars or spots right next to AdSense units, you can also use the tags to control which terms are highlighted.
Kontera doesn’t let you choose which terms and phrases you want turned into ads. But it does recommend that you make the phrases you use as specific as possible. Talking about the “Nokia 5300 XpressMusic myFaves Black Phone” from TMobile is likely to get you better ads and more clicks than talking about “mobile phones.” There are a lot of different strategies that you can use with Kontera. Far too many for me to describe in detail here. That’s why I put them together in a short book that lets other publishers can shorten their learning curve. You can find that book at www.konterasecrets.com. If you’re going to put Kontera on your site in addition to AdSense and I can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t you will need that book to shoot straight to the high revenues.
Furthermore, Kontera typically doesn’t allow publishers in their program unless they display at least 500,000 page views per month. However, I have made a special arrangement with the nice people at Kontera so that my readers can get a Kontera account regardless of how much traffic they receive! Simply click this link and be sure to put down “friend of Joel Comm” in the appropriate referral field. They will take good care of you.
19.2 Intellitxt’s EyeCatching Ads
Intellitxt is a direct rival to Kontera. The company’s system works in a similar way: by picking keywords, turning them into links and producing floating ads when users mouse over.
When Kontera was first rolled it was probably fair to say that Intellitxt was at least as good, if not better. Their ads looked great (Kontera’s were a bit bland initially) and they turned up some very good ads. These days I’m not so sure. The people at Kontera have put so much work into improving their contextualization engine that Intellitxt certainly doesn’t have an edge there. In fact, you can often find that the ads will match the keyword but the keywords won’t be the most relevant terms on the page. Nor can you define the link color, which is stuck on green or be certain that an ad will contain an image, the most attractive part of these sorts of floating ads. What you might get though is a movie. And those movies are great.
Unlike Google’s video ads, these start automatically and they’re impossible to miss. If you do have lots of users though or think you will soon those video ads might have been a good reason to choose Intellitxt over Kontera, but Kontera has now produced its own line of rich media ads. (Although again you need to be big to benefit from them.) The same placement and keyword strategies that work with Kontera should work with Intellitxt too but I’d always turn to Kontera first. It’s the system that I use on my blog.
19.3 ContextCASH Affiliate Revenue The Easy Way
If you don’t like either of those though, you could also look at ContextCASH. This system looks pretty similar to Kontera and Intellitxt but it works in a very different way. You still get the highlighted words that appear in your text but instead of bringing up an ad when you mouse over, these links lead directly to affiliate sites. Again, the links are unobtrusive, they don’t clash with your ad units and they’re compatible with AdSense. And they can also bring in good money too... provided you get the sales that win the commissions. Remember, with ContextCash, you get nothing if users click out of curiosity. You only get paid if they buy. While that will give you more money than the small amounts you’d get on a CPC basis, you have to make the sales.
The factor that is likely to have the greatest influence over whether or not you get sales is the context of the page and like any affiliate system whether or not you’ve recommended the products. And with ContextCash can be a problem. Usually, the best way to generate income with affiliate products is to choose them carefully and talk them up in your content. ContextCash’s affiliate ads though could change constantly so it will be difficult to recommend them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good though. Far from it. If the ads are contextual enough, the sites reputable enough and your content geared towards buyers you could see some great rewards. And you do have some control over all these elements. Not only can you optimize your links in all sorts of ways making them easy to blend in, you can also pick the keywords yourself, filter the source of your ads (most come from Amazon or Clickbank), view the list of ads that would fit your site and choose which ones to place on your page. In short, if you’re thinking of using affiliate ads on your site, this is a pretty unique way to do it. I think it’s worth testing them on one site and seeing how you get on.
Fig. 19.3 Choose affiliate links to scattered across the page with ContextCASH.
19.4 Chitika All Malls, More Money Kontera, Intellitxt and ContextCash all fit so neatly into your site, you’ll hardly notice the difference to your page.
You will notice the difference in your revenues though. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are more intrusive than text links but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of their greatest advantages is that they are just so eyecatching and attractive.
Fig. 19.4 Chitika’s eMiniMalls. Smile!
The eMiniMalls are product ads that come with a number of different tabs. Those tabs include a list of Best Deals (with paid links to advertisers), a description of the product, reviews and a search box that draws on Chitika’s catalog. The tabs bring up different content when they’re moused over and each ad also comes with a picture of the image.
Although you can let Chitika serve you contextualized ads, you can also turn off the contextualization engine and choose the ads you serve yourself. That’s a huge benefit: no more messing around with keywords or playing with text. You can just do a search, find an ad you like and start presenting it to your users. Again, there are all sorts of factors involved in making eMiniMalls work at their best, from deciding which tabs to display (you can choose those too!) to choosing the right ad format for your page to figuring out how to use the ads together with AdSense ad units. There are some great ways to make them work together. One of the biggest issues though is where on the page to place your eMiniMalls units. For the most part, what’s true for AdSense is true for Chitika too.
Ads above the fold get more clicks. Ads embedded into articles do well too. You could, for example, create an eMiniMalls shopping zone at the top of your page or slip a horizontal unit at the bottom of each article. But that might mean that your ads are going to be competing against each other for the same spots. Although you can test each type of ad to see which earns you more, you can often combine the two and increase your earnings. Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography Blog for example, is the perfect model to follow.
In general, you can expect to find that eMiniMalls do particularly well on sites that focus on products. But Darren has put the picture of the product in the center of the page, blended an AdSense unit next to it and complemented the review with eMiniMalls ad. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are an excellent product. I’ve used them at my site DealofDay.com and been very pleased with the result. But Chitika has some other products that are very attractive too. If you have a blog that focuses on products and has a lot of traffic, you should certainly take a look at their ShopLincs program. This lets you create an online store stuffed with products for users of your blog to purchase.
If you don’t qualify thoughand Chitika’s restrictions are tight enough to make sure that few people willyou can still put their ShopCloud$ units on your pages. These let users search for products, see results on your page... and earn you a commission when they click. I’ve spent a lot of time playing around with Chitikas ads as well, come up with some very effective strategies and written them up as another book. You can find that book at www.chitikasecrets.com.
All of these programs work with AdSense. I think it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll give you more money than AdSense but they can be very useful ways to bring in a little extra income. To sign up with Chitika, click here. Let’s talk now about programs that aren’t compatible with AdSense...
19.5 Yahoo! Publisher Network
Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) (http://publisher.yahoo.com/) is probably the number one competitor to Google. In fact, they pretty much copied what AdSense had done... but didn’t do it quite as well. On the plusside, their ad formats are largely the same. So if you need to switch from AdSense to YPN, you should be able to keep the exact same optimization, at least as regards how the ads look (although YPN doesn’t have Ad Links or Search, so you’d lose those.) They also have ads in RSS which could bring in some extra revenues if you’re using that on your site. As to which ads you get served though, that’s a whole other ball game. One of the biggest problems with YPN is that the first ads they serve are often Run Of The Network (RON) ads, Yahoo!’s answer to public service ads. These are just ads for companies that seem to have struck a special deal with YPN.
They pay well, when you get a click out of them, but they’re not contextualized so you don ’t get many clicks. They occur much more frequently than public service ads and they’re much harder to get rid of. And there are no CPM ads on Yahoo!, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the size of your site and your experience. Most publishers find that they get better results with AdSense than they do with YPN... although we all keep a close eye on YPN to see if they improve enough to attract us.
19.6 AdBrite
Google’s big thing is serving contextual ads. Their program checks the content of your site and delivers ads that they think your users will like. AdBrite is much simpler. The idea behind AdBrite is that people tend to ask popular sites to advertise their links. You’ve probably had that happen to you. Instead of asking for a link in return though, you could ask for money. AdBrite is a clearing house for sites that want to sell advertising space on their pages and for advertisers who want to choose where they want to place their ads.
For advertisers, the advantage over Google is that they know exactly where their ads are appearing and for exactly how much money each time. Publishers like you get to set your own ad rates, and you have the right to approve or reject every ad before it’s placed on your site. That gives you the power to choose your ads and your price instead of relying on whatever Google gives you. Those are the advantages. The disadvantages are that it’s just not in the same league as AdSense... or YPN. You can learn more about AdBrite at www.adbrite.com.
19.7 Kanoodle Bright Ads
The same criticism can be made of Kanoodle’s BrightAds service, which is similar to Google’s. It’s a search engine that delivers contextual ads to publishers’ websites. The contextualizing isn’t quite as accurate as Google’s but BrightAds does offer a number of options that Google doesn’t offer or at least not yet. Its RSS advertising program has been around for a while, it has a focus on local sites which might be attractive to businesses with local markets (or sites with content of local interest) and it also serves ads related to previous user behavior. If a user visits a lot of real estate sites, for example he could continue to receive ads about real estate even if he’s on a site about sport. That means your site could be displaying ads that have nothing to do with your content. That’s all creative stuff and it’s nice to see new ideas. It would be nicer though to see revenues that compete with Google’s and I haven’t heard of anyone earning more with BrightAds than they can earn with Google. BrightAds might be worth looking at if you want to make money with your RSS feed but I’m not convinced they’re going to give Google or Yahoo! any worries. Learn more about Kanoodle’s BrightAds at http://www.kanoodle.com
19.8 Searchfeed Searchfeed is slightly better, especially for international publishers. It also supplies contextualized ads to advertisers but offers geotargeting services which gives them a wide global reach, useful if you’re based outside the United States. You can integrate the ads smoothly into your site, either by cutting and pasting the HTML from their site or even by asking their own specialists to help you increase your CTR. And they have a good reputation for paying on time. Whether they’ll give you more money than Google is a different question though. The only way to find that out is to try it but if you find that you’re doing well with Google, then why would you bother? If, for some reason, you don’t want to use Google or can’t use Google and YPN isn’t your cup of tea either, then you might find Searchfeed a good alternative. You can learn more about Searchfeed at www.searchfeed.com
19.9 The Big Boys: eBay And Microsoft One of the great things about contextualized advertising is that outside of Google and Yahoo!, the best competitors are all startups. Or should that be upstarts? A couple of big boys though have begun to muscle in on the market.
The system scans publishers’ Web pages, identifies keywords and serves related ads drawn from its online auctions. Publishers receive between 40 and 70 percent of eBay’s commission on the sale. Unlike ContextCash though, these ads aren’t embedded into text. They appear in units, like AdSense ads. And like AdSense ads, you’re free to change the color scheme and ad size, and place the code wherever you want. But they’re always going to look like ads. When the most eyecatching part of the ad is the price, there’s no hiding the fact that any user who clicks is heading to a sales page and not to a site that will give him information. And because the ads will change with the auctions, unless you’re writing specifically about a product that someone is always selling at eBay, you’d probably do better promoting new goods with an Amazon affiliate ad.
That’s especially true as long as eBay make it difficult for people to join the program. The system is currently only available to eBay’s affiliates. But you can become an affiliate at www.affiliates.ebay.com and check out the ad program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/ads/adcontext/index.html. The other big company stepping into the filed is Microsoft. They’d been talking about rolling out a contextualized ad system for a long time but only really got going in 2006. They’re still far behind. There’s nowhere for publishers to sign up at the moment (it’s invitation only), the ads are only running on MSN’s own network and the inventory looks pretty limited. Although we know that the system is going to use demographic and geotargeting to keep the ads close to users, that advertisers can choose keywords and will pay per click, we know nothing about how the contextualization system is actually going to work. Some of the results turning up on some of MSN’s sites are way off. What we do know though is that the
19.1 Kontera Making Your Words Pay
Kontera (Kontera.com) is a great way to make extra revenue. Instead of putting ad units on your site, like AdSense does, Kontera highlights particular keywords in your text and brings up an ad when the user mouses over them. The words are marked out from regular links by an underline and a second dotted line, and you can change the colors of the text and the links. For some of the biggest publishers, the ad inventory even includes some very highearning video ads.
Fig. 19.1 Mousing over to bring up ads with Kontera
I use Kontera on my personal blog at JoelComm.com and I’ve been pretty impressed with the results. The ads are fun to bring up, they’re relevant and they’re totally unobtrusive. But like AdSense, you will need to play with them to maximize your revenues. There are so many different factors that affect your incomes with Kontera, such as which keywords you want highlighted, where you want those words to appear on the page and which colors to choose for the best results, that it took me some time to figure out all of the best combinations. It also took me a few phone calls directly to the people who’d created it to get an idea of what happens behind the scenes of the program so that I can maximize my income.
The key issues are the number of links you should place on your Web pages, the color of the links and how those links are distributed. The first issue is pretty simple. Kontera lets you place up to six ad links on each page and recommends that you take all of them. I don’t see any reason to argue with that. In general, your best strategy when building a website that earns income through advertising is to keep the pages relatively short and focused on just one topic. That will keep your ads relevant. If you’re following that strategy, then it’s unlikely that your page is going to look overstuffed with Kontera’s ads. You’ll probably find no more than three or four on a page, and because they only appear as links they won’t distract the user.
The color of the links is a tougher question. Usually, it’s best to choose a different color to the one you’ve used for your AdSense units. That’s because Google and Kontera tend to pick up on different keywords. Offering different links in different colors helps to emphasize that variety and lets Kontera’s links stand out. If you’re thinking that the goal of optimization is to blend the ads into your site, you’re right. But these links are going to be embedded in your content. They’re also going to be doubleunderlined so that they’ll look different anyway. You want people to see them and to place their mouse over them. You could try using blue as your link color if you want.
I use them sometimes on my blog. But I suspect that if you tested different colors, you might well find that a tone that matches your site’s design will give you better results. Testing is going to be key. Making sure that the ads appear in the best locations on the page is easy to do but might require a little work. For the most part, Kontera’s software should distribute the ads fairly evenly across the page. But if you want to make sure that you don’t get any ads in particular places on the page, you can use Zone Tags.
These simply tell Kontera: “No ads here please.” To define certain text areas as offlimit simply add the line: before the text, and the tag: at the end. If that sounds to you like AdSense’s Section Targeting, you’re on the right track. But Kontera’s filters aren’t exactly the same as Section Targeting. Placing these filter tags won’t prevent Kontera’s contextualization engine from checking that section for keywords. The contents of that section will still be used to assess the meaning of the Web page. Kontera just won’t place ads on any keywords it finds there. While that’s useful for keeping ads away from the bottom of the page, the sidebars or spots right next to AdSense units, you can also use the tags to control which terms are highlighted.
Kontera doesn’t let you choose which terms and phrases you want turned into ads. But it does recommend that you make the phrases you use as specific as possible. Talking about the “Nokia 5300 XpressMusic myFaves Black Phone” from TMobile is likely to get you better ads and more clicks than talking about “mobile phones.” There are a lot of different strategies that you can use with Kontera. Far too many for me to describe in detail here. That’s why I put them together in a short book that lets other publishers can shorten their learning curve. You can find that book at www.konterasecrets.com. If you’re going to put Kontera on your site in addition to AdSense and I can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t you will need that book to shoot straight to the high revenues.
Furthermore, Kontera typically doesn’t allow publishers in their program unless they display at least 500,000 page views per month. However, I have made a special arrangement with the nice people at Kontera so that my readers can get a Kontera account regardless of how much traffic they receive! Simply click this link and be sure to put down “friend of Joel Comm” in the appropriate referral field. They will take good care of you.
19.2 Intellitxt’s EyeCatching Ads
Fig. 19.2 Intellitxt’s video ads grab your attention.
Intellitxt is a direct rival to Kontera. The company’s system works in a similar way: by picking keywords, turning them into links and producing floating ads when users mouse over.
When Kontera was first rolled it was probably fair to say that Intellitxt was at least as good, if not better. Their ads looked great (Kontera’s were a bit bland initially) and they turned up some very good ads. These days I’m not so sure. The people at Kontera have put so much work into improving their contextualization engine that Intellitxt certainly doesn’t have an edge there. In fact, you can often find that the ads will match the keyword but the keywords won’t be the most relevant terms on the page. Nor can you define the link color, which is stuck on green or be certain that an ad will contain an image, the most attractive part of these sorts of floating ads. What you might get though is a movie. And those movies are great.
Unlike Google’s video ads, these start automatically and they’re impossible to miss. If you do have lots of users though or think you will soon those video ads might have been a good reason to choose Intellitxt over Kontera, but Kontera has now produced its own line of rich media ads. (Although again you need to be big to benefit from them.) The same placement and keyword strategies that work with Kontera should work with Intellitxt too but I’d always turn to Kontera first. It’s the system that I use on my blog.
19.3 ContextCASH Affiliate Revenue The Easy Way
If you don’t like either of those though, you could also look at ContextCASH. This system looks pretty similar to Kontera and Intellitxt but it works in a very different way. You still get the highlighted words that appear in your text but instead of bringing up an ad when you mouse over, these links lead directly to affiliate sites. Again, the links are unobtrusive, they don’t clash with your ad units and they’re compatible with AdSense. And they can also bring in good money too... provided you get the sales that win the commissions. Remember, with ContextCash, you get nothing if users click out of curiosity. You only get paid if they buy. While that will give you more money than the small amounts you’d get on a CPC basis, you have to make the sales.
The factor that is likely to have the greatest influence over whether or not you get sales is the context of the page and like any affiliate system whether or not you’ve recommended the products. And with ContextCash can be a problem. Usually, the best way to generate income with affiliate products is to choose them carefully and talk them up in your content. ContextCash’s affiliate ads though could change constantly so it will be difficult to recommend them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good though. Far from it. If the ads are contextual enough, the sites reputable enough and your content geared towards buyers you could see some great rewards. And you do have some control over all these elements. Not only can you optimize your links in all sorts of ways making them easy to blend in, you can also pick the keywords yourself, filter the source of your ads (most come from Amazon or Clickbank), view the list of ads that would fit your site and choose which ones to place on your page. In short, if you’re thinking of using affiliate ads on your site, this is a pretty unique way to do it. I think it’s worth testing them on one site and seeing how you get on.
Fig. 19.3 Choose affiliate links to scattered across the page with ContextCASH.
19.4 Chitika All Malls, More Money Kontera, Intellitxt and ContextCash all fit so neatly into your site, you’ll hardly notice the difference to your page.
You will notice the difference in your revenues though. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are more intrusive than text links but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of their greatest advantages is that they are just so eyecatching and attractive.
Fig. 19.4 Chitika’s eMiniMalls. Smile!
The eMiniMalls are product ads that come with a number of different tabs. Those tabs include a list of Best Deals (with paid links to advertisers), a description of the product, reviews and a search box that draws on Chitika’s catalog. The tabs bring up different content when they’re moused over and each ad also comes with a picture of the image.
Although you can let Chitika serve you contextualized ads, you can also turn off the contextualization engine and choose the ads you serve yourself. That’s a huge benefit: no more messing around with keywords or playing with text. You can just do a search, find an ad you like and start presenting it to your users. Again, there are all sorts of factors involved in making eMiniMalls work at their best, from deciding which tabs to display (you can choose those too!) to choosing the right ad format for your page to figuring out how to use the ads together with AdSense ad units. There are some great ways to make them work together. One of the biggest issues though is where on the page to place your eMiniMalls units. For the most part, what’s true for AdSense is true for Chitika too.
Ads above the fold get more clicks. Ads embedded into articles do well too. You could, for example, create an eMiniMalls shopping zone at the top of your page or slip a horizontal unit at the bottom of each article. But that might mean that your ads are going to be competing against each other for the same spots. Although you can test each type of ad to see which earns you more, you can often combine the two and increase your earnings. Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography Blog for example, is the perfect model to follow.
Fig. 19.5 Darren Rowse’s photography blog shows the way to mix AdSense with eMiniMalls.
In general, you can expect to find that eMiniMalls do particularly well on sites that focus on products. But Darren has put the picture of the product in the center of the page, blended an AdSense unit next to it and complemented the review with eMiniMalls ad. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are an excellent product. I’ve used them at my site DealofDay.com and been very pleased with the result. But Chitika has some other products that are very attractive too. If you have a blog that focuses on products and has a lot of traffic, you should certainly take a look at their ShopLincs program. This lets you create an online store stuffed with products for users of your blog to purchase.
If you don’t qualify thoughand Chitika’s restrictions are tight enough to make sure that few people willyou can still put their ShopCloud$ units on your pages. These let users search for products, see results on your page... and earn you a commission when they click. I’ve spent a lot of time playing around with Chitikas ads as well, come up with some very effective strategies and written them up as another book. You can find that book at www.chitikasecrets.com.
Fig. 19.6 Chitika’s ShopCloud$ offer a new way of earning for clicks.
All of these programs work with AdSense. I think it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll give you more money than AdSense but they can be very useful ways to bring in a little extra income. To sign up with Chitika, click here. Let’s talk now about programs that aren’t compatible with AdSense...
19.5 Yahoo! Publisher Network
Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) (http://publisher.yahoo.com/) is probably the number one competitor to Google. In fact, they pretty much copied what AdSense had done... but didn’t do it quite as well. On the plusside, their ad formats are largely the same. So if you need to switch from AdSense to YPN, you should be able to keep the exact same optimization, at least as regards how the ads look (although YPN doesn’t have Ad Links or Search, so you’d lose those.) They also have ads in RSS which could bring in some extra revenues if you’re using that on your site. As to which ads you get served though, that’s a whole other ball game. One of the biggest problems with YPN is that the first ads they serve are often Run Of The Network (RON) ads, Yahoo!’s answer to public service ads. These are just ads for companies that seem to have struck a special deal with YPN.
They pay well, when you get a click out of them, but they’re not contextualized so you don ’t get many clicks. They occur much more frequently than public service ads and they’re much harder to get rid of. And there are no CPM ads on Yahoo!, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the size of your site and your experience. Most publishers find that they get better results with AdSense than they do with YPN... although we all keep a close eye on YPN to see if they improve enough to attract us.
19.6 AdBrite
Google’s big thing is serving contextual ads. Their program checks the content of your site and delivers ads that they think your users will like. AdBrite is much simpler. The idea behind AdBrite is that people tend to ask popular sites to advertise their links. You’ve probably had that happen to you. Instead of asking for a link in return though, you could ask for money. AdBrite is a clearing house for sites that want to sell advertising space on their pages and for advertisers who want to choose where they want to place their ads.
For advertisers, the advantage over Google is that they know exactly where their ads are appearing and for exactly how much money each time. Publishers like you get to set your own ad rates, and you have the right to approve or reject every ad before it’s placed on your site. That gives you the power to choose your ads and your price instead of relying on whatever Google gives you. Those are the advantages. The disadvantages are that it’s just not in the same league as AdSense... or YPN. You can learn more about AdBrite at www.adbrite.com.
19.7 Kanoodle Bright Ads
The same criticism can be made of Kanoodle’s BrightAds service, which is similar to Google’s. It’s a search engine that delivers contextual ads to publishers’ websites. The contextualizing isn’t quite as accurate as Google’s but BrightAds does offer a number of options that Google doesn’t offer or at least not yet. Its RSS advertising program has been around for a while, it has a focus on local sites which might be attractive to businesses with local markets (or sites with content of local interest) and it also serves ads related to previous user behavior. If a user visits a lot of real estate sites, for example he could continue to receive ads about real estate even if he’s on a site about sport. That means your site could be displaying ads that have nothing to do with your content. That’s all creative stuff and it’s nice to see new ideas. It would be nicer though to see revenues that compete with Google’s and I haven’t heard of anyone earning more with BrightAds than they can earn with Google. BrightAds might be worth looking at if you want to make money with your RSS feed but I’m not convinced they’re going to give Google or Yahoo! any worries. Learn more about Kanoodle’s BrightAds at http://www.kanoodle.com
19.8 Searchfeed Searchfeed is slightly better, especially for international publishers. It also supplies contextualized ads to advertisers but offers geotargeting services which gives them a wide global reach, useful if you’re based outside the United States. You can integrate the ads smoothly into your site, either by cutting and pasting the HTML from their site or even by asking their own specialists to help you increase your CTR. And they have a good reputation for paying on time. Whether they’ll give you more money than Google is a different question though. The only way to find that out is to try it but if you find that you’re doing well with Google, then why would you bother? If, for some reason, you don’t want to use Google or can’t use Google and YPN isn’t your cup of tea either, then you might find Searchfeed a good alternative. You can learn more about Searchfeed at www.searchfeed.com
19.9 The Big Boys: eBay And Microsoft One of the great things about contextualized advertising is that outside of Google and Yahoo!, the best competitors are all startups. Or should that be upstarts? A couple of big boys though have begun to muscle in on the market.
Fig. 19.7 eBay’s ad selections. eBay now has its own contextualized affiliate system.
The system scans publishers’ Web pages, identifies keywords and serves related ads drawn from its online auctions. Publishers receive between 40 and 70 percent of eBay’s commission on the sale. Unlike ContextCash though, these ads aren’t embedded into text. They appear in units, like AdSense ads. And like AdSense ads, you’re free to change the color scheme and ad size, and place the code wherever you want. But they’re always going to look like ads. When the most eyecatching part of the ad is the price, there’s no hiding the fact that any user who clicks is heading to a sales page and not to a site that will give him information. And because the ads will change with the auctions, unless you’re writing specifically about a product that someone is always selling at eBay, you’d probably do better promoting new goods with an Amazon affiliate ad.
That’s especially true as long as eBay make it difficult for people to join the program. The system is currently only available to eBay’s affiliates. But you can become an affiliate at www.affiliates.ebay.com and check out the ad program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/ads/adcontext/index.html. The other big company stepping into the filed is Microsoft. They’d been talking about rolling out a contextualized ad system for a long time but only really got going in 2006. They’re still far behind. There’s nowhere for publishers to sign up at the moment (it’s invitation only), the ads are only running on MSN’s own network and the inventory looks pretty limited. Although we know that the system is going to use demographic and geotargeting to keep the ads close to users, that advertisers can choose keywords and will pay per click, we know nothing about how the contextualization system is actually going to work. Some of the results turning up on some of MSN’s sites are way off. What we do know though is that the
Fig. 19.8 A contextualized ad unit at ad units are going to look a lot like the bottom of moneycentral.msn.com
AdSense units. If Microsoft can build up advertisers and iron out the bugs, they could be a good alternative to Google and YPN. Until then though, it’s still AdSense plus text links and affiliate ads. 
