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Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?

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Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?

#81

Todd 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.…

Todd, I signed up with BSA today after seeing your comment here. You do not use HTTPS for publishers to log in. This does not inspire confidence in the company.

Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?

#82

Todd 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.…

Thanks Todd. Out of curiosity, how big do you have to be for Rubicon Project and PubMatic, in terms of pageviews/mo?

10 million++ page views per month for them to seriously consider partnering with you.

Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?

#83
post #81

Todd 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.…

Todd, I signed up with BSA today after seeing your comment here. You do not use HTTPS for publishers to log in. This does not inspire confidence in the company.

You're right - we have some non-ssl'd pages that you're allowed to login from - something we've gotta fix.

Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?

#84
post #15

Hi, 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…

Do you look at the page text to see what ads fit the page (which I believe AdSense does)? I'm asking because I just signed up and it seemed like the ads I saw on my site were completely random:

Top Rated Hybrids, Dividend Income Funds, Best Tablets, Best Cars, Best Stocks To Buy, and Luxury SUVs.

Is there a way for me to indicate which category my site is in?

I also got ads with ugly green buttons. Is there a way for me to prevent this ad scheme?

Also, is there any way for me to change the color of the links?

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?

#85

so, 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.

Don't use Lijit, ever. I was running them as backup to my Adsense, sending them nearly a million impressions a day. They run all sorts of malicious advertisements, and apparently they approve of them. My users were getting redirected from my site, to sites telling them their Javascript is outdated, with download links to malware. My mobile users would get popups about their Android device being out of date, and similar. I looked up the redirect URLs on Google, and this was affecting other sites as well, and I found a handful of forums running Lijit, where their users were reporting the same troubles.

This was incredibly damaging to my reputation. I narrowed it down to Lijit after toggling my ad networks and informed them of the issue. I emailed them, explained how my users are getting these redirects on a daily basis, how this is unacceptable, and how I'll have to pull their ads until they're able to resolve the issue. Their response? They didn't care, they just said, we understand your concern for not wanting to continue our relationship. That was it, they're not looking into it, they didn't apologize, nothing.

I tried them again last month, after I cut them for the previous 6 months. Within a day, I had over a dozen users sending reports about malicious redirects. I disabled Lijit, and things were fine. I used Lijit for 8 months without trouble, and enjoyed their service since the interface is decent, rates competitive, tracking and payments done right, etc. However, since these issues started, I have no choice but to leave. It's sad they have no interest in solving them, because like I said, they have potential. Redirecting my visitors to malware though, and allowing that on the network? It's inexcusable.

Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?

#87
post #11

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.

I work at BSA .. would love to chat with your friend to see if we could highlight his site on our blog in a case study.

My email is tom at buysellads.com

Re: Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?

#88
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've noticed a decrease in tier 1 advertisers over the last 18 months. We get a million+ uniques per month and are very picky about the ads we run. The decrease in tier 1 has been small businesses who have become concerned that their ads may be misconstrued as 'link buying' and will cause them to be penalized in Google's search so all that is left for us are the large brands. Many of the small businesses had been ad…

That's scary. Do Google really penalise companies who buy advertising from other sites other than via Google Adsense?

You can't make a connection direct enough, but well, yeah, that happened and happens all the time. Penguin update is all about that. They may be sincerely thinking that penguin stops direct link buying so that you have better results or more natural results. The outcome is that shitty results are still all over the place, good content is not king and if you want to advertise without any risk you go through Adsense. That is particularly true in smaller markets where Adsense is the only possible player unless you're big enough to have different deals with classic media agencies (those who manage all kind of ads -- print, tv and web.
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