Belchfire Search Engine Marketing

If you have a community/non-profit web site and are looking for ways to pay for your hosting fees, consider using an ad network to serve banner ads. I’ve been using several ad networks for a number of years and recommend the following companies:

1) FastClick - Fast, reliable, pays promptly. Largest selection of mediums (unique ‘Invue’ scroller) and now textads. I’ve been using FastClick since 2001 and am very pleased with the results. Soon to be aquired by ValueClick.

2) Casale Media - Realtime stats and high payouts. Only been using them for a few months but the stats are great and payouts for many campaigns beat FastClick. I now use Casale as my primary content deliverer with ‘default’ campaigns of FastClick. Supposedly the second-largest ad network and growing fast. (Canadian!)

3) Google Adsense - For my site at least, nobody beats Google for content-based ads. I use Google for my leaderboard and they consistently outperform every other ad network I’ve used for the same medium and position.

4) Clicksor - Bad Pop-up code so avoid it, but their unique context-targeted ‘link’ ads are slick. Good compliment to other existing campaigns you might be running. (Canadian!)

5) PHPAdsNew - Not a banner network but rather open-source ad network software. Great for running your own ads, selling ad space on your site or even as it’s own business. Complete with stats and email reports. Exploits discovered in every recent release so if you use it, ensure you upgrade it whenever a new version is released. I use PHPAdsNew to serve up my own text-ads.

Speaking of text-ads, as people have become more and more incensed to banner and popup ads (assuming your visitors don’t block them altogether via browser, toolbar plugins or third-party software), text-ads have been performing suprisingly well compared to their more traditional counterparts. This is why Google Adsense serves primarily text-ads but contained within traditional aspect banner formats.

As I might have posted recently, and to expand on my notes regarding FastClick above, they were recently aquired by ValueClick. This may or may not be a good thing. I applied for a ValueClick advertiser account several times in the last five years and was turned down every time so can’t comment on their network or compare to any I have used. However I’ve noticed that FastClick’s inventory in certain mediums has dropped the last three to six weeks and so have my revenues. So I’ve switched my primary provider to Casale with FastClick serving up only ‘default’ ads and a select few mediums not available on other networks.

About ‘default’ ads. What I mean by that is, when your primary provider can’t serve up paid ads they generally serve up non-paying, community service ads just to fill the space (and so you don’t see a big broken image on your pages). I’ve never fully understood why this is, but my observation has been that only around 50% of all banners displayed, at least on my site, are actual paid ads. This is fine, but it reduces your full earning potential. Most ad networks such as FastClick, Casale and Google, allow you to setup your own ‘default’ creatives. So rather than their non-paying community-service ads being displayed when they can’t serve up a paying ad, they will show your custom default creative. The default custom creative can be another ad network! So by taking advantage of this feature and specifying another ad network as the default for each media type you use, you can maximize your earnings potential by achieving a higher paid fill-rate.

Some other methods of generating revenues are:

Referral Earnings. Can’t say that I’ve ever really seen any referral earnings from any ad network (I think I have a few un-confirmed referrals on Clicksor). But, if you can get any it can be a good revenue stream as you generally get a percentage of the payouts for the referring site for life. Sounds like Amway

Subscriptions/Donations. This is new to me so just trying a few things out. Will let you know my observations down the road. I have friends using a PayPal donation box that receive a few donations a month but nothing to write home about.

Affiliate Sales. Consider software affiliate sales. It’s less obtrusive than banners or pop-ups, the commissions per sale are usually pretty good, but fewer sales per day than clicks from an ad networks banner ads. Look for software/services that are related to or of interest to your audience for best results. I make a few bucks on affiliate sales but not enought to fund the site on their own.

Anyways, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive look at everything. Just a few of my own observations and suggestions if you’re looking to offset your hosting costs, and what as worked for me.

• All ad networks above pay in US funds. Method of payment can vary from PayPal to direct deposit to paper cheque. I have all mine accounts paid by cheque.