10 ms·

Ask HN: AdSense alternatives?

• thenomad 12y ago
  What's the niche? It's more work, but you can generate similar levels of income - or sometimes more - using affiliate programs from sites like Commission Junction, ShareASale, and Clickbank. You'll need to test and optimise, but the rewards can be considerable.
• dublinben 12y ago
  Have you considered working directly with the most relevant advertisers for your niche market?
  • marymarks 12y ago
    Thats what I ended up doing after my AdSense account was banned and I couldnt find a good alternative to match my sites. Its a hit and miss though. Nothing like what I was earning with AdSense.
• gesman 12y ago
  I suggest to come up with your own buyable products (tutorials, how-to's, etc..) and show half of it (teaser) to everyone and allow to see the rest to paid members. Then you may charge per download, or full access based on recurring membership fee. You may also offer free membership to capture emails and then market to interested visitors further. Whoring your traffic to other people's platforms or products leaves no residual value to you and makes you vulnerable to other people TOS'es, moods and playrules. The point is to use Google what it's good for - to send you prospects. Your task is to capture prospect's contacts and establish relationships with them. Begging for Adsense peanuts is unsustainable strategy as many people are finding out the hard way. (PS: I worked on bulding membership site software that allows you to do just that with a few clicks)
  • scotchio 12y ago
    Thanks for your feedback. Yeah, this is probably the direction we will eventually have to go. I really like this approach, but we'd rather focus on the content and articles now versus, say, the business side of it - unless it grows into something bigger. My other thought was to put new articles up with a community-based bitcoin paywall. Basically if we receive "X" donations from the community, this article becomes public forever. I'm not sure how that will be received by our user base though (tech, web developers).
    • gesman 12y ago
      I'm actually the one who created free Bitcoin plugin for Wordpress/WooCommerce as well :) https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-woocommerce/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-woocommer... Feel free to utilize it for that purpose. It could be a great strategy.
• Ryan_Jones 12y ago
  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/ http://www.dotcult.com/best-adsense-alternatives/ TLDR: casale, Lijit, technorati are working best for me.
  • avalaunch 12y ago
    Linking to a page that exactly answers the question being asked is definitely not spam.
    • JeremyMorgan 12y ago
      Exactly, but I could see the concern with posting it. Upvoted for relevance
      • CyberShadow 12y ago
        One possible concern is that the article uses affiliate links for every recommendation.
  • billmalarky 12y ago
    Lijit was the best alternative for me, and I went through a good 5-6 networks. However, their CPM's were significantly less than adsense. Their support is really good though and they do actually have control over their inventory unlike a lot of other ad networks I worked with (many networks claim to be able to block audible/video/popup malicious ads but still allow many to slip through). Technorati is decent I believe (only used them for about a month) but their ads must be served out of an iframe (so they can't be contextual - so less CPM) because their ad servers are so slow and they are page blocking.
    • Ryan_Jones 12y ago
      I still use Lijit for their "backup ads" feature. Basically, I monitor the CPMs I'm getting from other networks, then set my floor CPM in Lijit to that number. That way, I get about 30% fill with Lijit - but it's guaranteed to be at a higher CPM than the other network. Chaining them together works really well - you just need to do it asynchronously so that it doesn't impact load times.
• higherpurpose 12y ago
  For ads, I don't think others pay quite as well, and even those that come close, usually require at least 100,000 uniques a month or something like that. But if it's not too irrelevant to that topic, I suggest combining whatever ad network you have with Amazon affiliate links. It helped me double my Adsense income for the same traffic. Ultimately, if you have some quality service or content that you can sell, membership/subscription model is the best. I know someone who just gave up on Adsense, and was making 10x the Adsense revenue from subscriptions.
  • toddynho 12y ago
    Indeed, there are many folks doing this very successfully. It's certainly not for everyone though, and does require a bit of work. We actually work with a bunch of folks who are doing this successfully over at a side-project of ours: http://syndicateads.net http://syndicateads.net
• jordsmi 12y ago
  Depends 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
  • vittore 12y ago
    Do you know other places like clickbank?
• antr 12y ago
  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.
  • toddynho 12y ago
    Very cool - always great to hear about people doing well with our Unreserved program! Thank you for sharing with the HN crowd.
  • livestyle 12y ago
    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
• Eleutheria 12y ago
  I wish Mozilla started their own ads platform for Firefox OS. It looks promising.
• malchow 12y ago
  You could try Publir.com. (Disclaimer: I'm cofounder.)
  • owenversteeg 12y ago
    This doesn't look like an AdSense alternative. I think most people are looking for something that they can click a button, get a <script> tag they can drop in their page, and earn a few dollars a month to offset the cost of hosting. Your site looks like something catering to large publishers. p.s. The landing page makes me confused on exactly what it is that your site does.
    • malchow 12y ago
      Yeah -- with Publir, we want to speak with every applicant first. But aside from that, it is more or less as simple as us generated a <script> tag and sending that over.
      • livestyle 12y ago
        @malchow I work at BSA and would love to chat with you guys. Good way to connect?
        • malchow 12y ago
          @livestyle Would love to talk. I'm at joe (at sign) publir.com. Let me know that you came through YC.
• Chitika 12y ago
  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 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. :)
  • junto 12y ago
    What is your company's policy on ads that automatically open up iTunes or Google Play if they detect an iOS or Android device. Because that shady practice is really starting to annoy me. I've now had to enable parental controls (for myself) and block the iTunes app to prevent these annoying subversive ads from hijacking my browser on my iPad. I'd like to see a policy of 1 warning then a ban for ad publishers who use these underhanded methods.
    • Chitika 12y ago
      An ad should never open up an application on your device for you. It should only direct you to content that you've asked to see (because you made a decision to click on that ad). We hate annoying ads too! If you do see a Chitika ad that does this, let us know ASAP so we can remove it and make sure it's not happening anywhere else.
  • owenversteeg 12y ago
    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!
• toddynho 12y ago
  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. 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 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.
  • adsensertoo 12y ago
    Thanks Todd. Out of curiosity, how big do you have to be for Rubicon Project and PubMatic, in terms of pageviews/mo?
    • toddynho 12y ago
      Well, Rubicon for example has 700 sell-side partners [1]... so, very large. PubMatic, I believe, is similar. Your other options for mixing stuff in with AdSense would be to find some fairly targeted affiliate programs; however, it's tedious and requires quite a bit of upkeep. [1] http://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/as-ipo-dust-settles-rubicon-project-prepares-to-invest/ http://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/as-ipo-dust-settles-rub...
    • putlake 12y ago
• antjanus 12y ago
  Honestly, 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/ 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 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.
  • vblord 12y ago
    is a site called AntiAnus safe for me to view at work?
    • wlesieutre 12y ago
      It's a j, not an i. A bit tough to tell with the underline there.
    • dhimant 12y ago
      It's AntJanus.
    • ceejayoz 12y ago
      The link reads ANTJANUS, not ANTIANUS.
  • elwell 12y ago
    The Digital Ocean ad on your site is a faulty link that 404s
• cyborgx7 12y ago
  Are there any ad networks that don't track the people looking at your site? That would be a valuable feature to me.
  • rajivtiru 12y ago
    You mean doesn't track views but only tracks clicks/conversions? The only problem I would see with that is that if a user already converted by clicking the ad, he would continue to see the same ad when he is on your site again. You're no longer able to extract more $ from that user.
  • Johnie 12y ago
    You're basically asking to show ads that are even more irrelevant and useless to your users? The best ads for publishers and users are ones that are relevant. If you want to display something that is irrelevant to the user and ineffective for the advertiser, you might as well not display ads at all and avoid annoying your users.
    • cyborgx7 12y ago
      What if they show ads based on the focus of the site instead of information about the user?
      • dfgonzalez 12y ago
        You can, there are plenty of XML feed providers who will provide you an XML of ads relevant to the keywords you provide, which you collect server side and display to your users.
  • whatnow0 12y ago
    If you're wanting that, host ad banners locally and use CPA/affiliate links instead. The additional benefit to this is that Adblock doesn't block them unless you name the div id or url 'advertisement'.
  • toddynho 12y ago
    Through our marketplace we don't track any personal or sensitive info about users, or use it to figure out which ads to display. The most sensitive info we use to show ads would be geo-location (just country...). Advertisers are selecting the sites they want to advertise with based on the sites topical area vs. us coming up with some magical algorithm that matches an ad with a user.
• wiwillia 12y ago
  Have 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.
• sergiotapia 12y ago
  I had a website that had around 50,000 hits/month and made about $150/month with no input from me. We used the ad network called Project Wonderful. It's simple to use and manage.
• MicroBerto 12y ago
  If you're in health/fitness/nutrition/diet, we have some tools using the PricePlow API. Buzz me if so and good luck!
• mdprasadeng 12y ago
  http://www.media.net/publishers http://www.media.net/publishers media.net, my previous company. We used to consider ourself in competition with adsense. They have some big name customers like forbes, cosmopolitan etc.
  • borat4prez 12y ago
    I recently split my ads (50% AdSense | 50% Media.Net) on one of the blogs I maintain and they both earn very close to the same amount every day. I like the service.
• maxsavin 12y ago
  SEO is on the way out, and AdSense is too expensive. Social media is the new SEO, check out this book for the insider tips: http://massivefollowing.com http://massivefollowing.com
  • eightofdiamonds 12y ago
    Do you know what AdSense is?
• hurlio333 12y ago
  Agree with Todd's general setup. CPM's on display ads are in a death spiral thanks to a glut of inventory and programmatic buying/targeting options. Particularly for a tutorial site I would consider paid, clearly marked sponsored tutorials that you produce and keep full editorial control over. In moderation it can work well and still have educational value for readers and drive results for advertisers way beyond any display ads, and significantly more revenue for you. Full disclosure I handle direct ad sales for publishers with this exact same model at TechCrowds.com (including representing a few BuySellAds publishers)
• whatnow0 12y ago
  Does anyone know of an ad network which pays out in Bitcoin but targetted towards general users? Coinurl, a-ads etc have an extremely low CTR because they are targetted to only Bitcoins users. Are there any plans for popular ad networks to payout in Bitcoin anytime soon? Another solution would be to use affiliate programmes such as Privateinternetaccess but once again, it would generate a low CTR I would presume.
  • toddynho 12y ago
    We've had some folks request to be paid out in Bitcoin. We're open to doing this once we have a handful more (or so) ask for it... the tricky thing is that you then have to play the exchange rate game and withdraw money from BuySellAds when it's "favorable" for you to do so, since the advertisers aren't actually paying you in Bitcoin.
• malchow 12y ago
  There are alternatives to AdSense, but the key here is to recognize that AdSense enjoys its favorable position in part by sourcing advertiser demand from other platforms. There is a massive and creative ecosystem around developing technology to suit (and sometimes to drive) the mercurial wishes of ad agencies. So Google captures this through partnerships. Ad demand that's actually originated by Google sales is very significant and very high quality, but there's no doubt that Google is simultaneously interested in serving its own wholly owned properties. The best thing to do is to build relationships with 5-9 high quality ad platforms and waterfall them through passback tags, one to the other. Good platforms include, but are certainly not limited to: AOL x+1 AppNexus Turn MediaMath AudienceScience Criteo The Trade Desk If you're lucky, you can satisfy all requests without sending a single impression over to AdSense. If your domain is delivering fewer than 100m impressions monthly, it's unlikely that the companies noted above will be keen to put personnel on your account, and may not be able to work with you at all. However, with intelligent switching, keen arbitrage, and an aggressive performant waterfall (e.g., you never actually want to pass a request to more than two or three of these or you'll see packet loss that exceeds the positive delta you'd have obtained by accessing yet another ad platform) you can do very well without using AdSense. The company I mentioned below, Publir, was cofounded by me about five years ago and does what we think is a rather good job of this. Sites like The Atlantic and others use us for their ads. We're also terrific fans of BuySellAds, whose self-serve platform is second to none. There, your goal is simply to do direct outreach to advertisers likely to covet your audience. Even the finest brand-name publishers only sell about 30% of their ads this way, though, so your expectations ought not be too high.
• Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
  MediaCrush (https://mediacru.sh https://mediacru.sh) uses Project Wonderful. We describe our reasons here: https://mediacru.sh/advertising https://mediacru.sh/advertising. In short, they are pro-user and generally seem like good guys, and they give us a lot of control.
• Amatewasu 12y ago
  I launched few months ago an alternative to AdSense: PandAd. https://pandad.eu https://pandad.eu However we focus a French public for the moment. But we try to do not track visitors of our publishers.