I have a close friend who went from AdSense to BuySellAds Unreserved and saw a spike in CPM of c. 60-70%, with quality ads (I think he said these were primarily retargeting driven). I don't think he is going back to AdSense.
Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?
11–20 of 88 posts
Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?
#12I wish Mozilla started their own ads platform for Firefox OS.
It looks promising.
Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?
#13so, I realize this might be seen as spam, but I am always trying out adsense alternatives and regularly maintain a list of the ones I'm trying out. http://www.dotcult.com/best-adsense-alternatives/ TLDR: casale, Lijit, technorati are working best for me.
Linking to a page that exactly answers the question being asked is definitely not spam.
Exactly, but I could see the concern with posting it. Upvoted for relevance
Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?
#14You could try Publir.com. (Disclaimer: I'm cofounder.)
Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?
#15Hi,
Chitika customer support here! Our ad network is often used by those who cannot get AdSense approval but who still have high-quality sites. You can even test us out alongside AdSense -- we've found most publishers who use Chitika AND AdSense make more money than those who use AdSense alone.
We have search-targeted text, display, mobile, in-text, pop-out, and highlight ads available to all of our publishers.
Feel free to drop me a line at support@chitika.com if you or your friend have any questions. We can take a look at your blog and suggest certain ad types & placements that would work well for your specific blog. :)
Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?
#16Todd from @BuySellAds here.
An ideal setup is one in which you utilize about a handful of different companies in the "Tier 2" position. Probably no more than a handful though, because after that it gets hard to manage and rather convoluted.
Tier 1 is your directly sold ads (stuff you sell on your own directly to an advertiser or through a company like BuySellAds).
Tier 2 is where the AdSense's of the world will live. It really depends on your "niche", but in general the best options tend to be: AdSense, Rubicon Project (if you're big enough), PubMatic (again, if you're big enough), or a "niche/vertical" ad company that focuses on sites like yours. By-and-large, AdSense "owns" this space outright, and even if you're using a program like ours (http://buysellads.com/publishers/unreserved) for your "non-reserved" inventory (stuff that isn't sold direct) there's going to be SOME mix of AdSense (or AdX) in there.
Ad money certainly isn't easy, and more and more is going to go toward those publishers creating great content and curating high-value audiences (i.e. not user generated content...). The days of "set it and forget it" are over for most publishers who aren't interested in earning pennies on the dollar. If you can't sell ads directly through a service like BuySellAds or on your own, well, I wish you luck :)
It's not all doom and gloom though - we see publishers make quite a bit of money all the time. It ultimately comes down to the quality of their site, it's content, and the users.
Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?
#17Honestly, none of that. Create your own "ad network".
Basically, figure out the theme of your blog and what kind of people it attracts and then find affiliate programs for that.
For example. Let's say your tutorials are for developers. What do developers need?
* development tools * hosting * further courses/learning
That will yield a pretty good list of affiliates that will convert well such as:
* New Relic * Digital Ocean * TeamTreeHouse
(respectively). You'll make much more cash, and it'll work better for your site. [Checkout my site](http://antjanus.com/) for instance. I have a TeamTreeHouse ad (affiliate) which makes me a solid $X every month. The adsense ad underneath makes about $X/100 (it was slightly better when it was at the top of the sidebar but still made only a fraction of what the TTH ad made). I also have an ad for Bootstrap themes on my Bootstrap tutorials. That ad makes about $X/2 BUT my teamtreehouse ad performed at $X/25 for those articles, makes sense?
Anyways, I'm getting rid of adsense in favor of my own "ad network".
EDIT A good example of other people doing this is [TechPro](http://tech.pro) (I worked there briefly during the first sprint to make a pre-alpha whatever) which has its own ad serving network and directly serves affiliate programs.
Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?
#18Depends on the type of traffic, but I think it's best to just push CPA offers, or actual products from places like cj or clickbank
Do you know other places like clickbank?
Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?
#19Are there any ad networks that don't track the people looking at your site? That would be a valuable feature to me.
Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?
#20Have you considered trying another way to monetize? Selling merchandise, especially if you have an engaged audience, tends to have a higher effective CPM ($20-100+ in our experience) and can be run simultaneously with ads.
Teespring (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder and t-shirt addict) can be an effective tool for doing just this. We ship hundreds of thousands of products each month, you get retail quality products and margins as though you were paying up front.
Absolutely no risk and no costs. You'll never pay us a penny, we only make money if you do.