Contextual advertising has literally saved the Internet. With the advent of contextual ads, websites are able to focus
once again on quality content, making the internet a resource for free information. It used to be that Google Adsense was
the undisputed leader in contextual ads & it has also come to notice that Google has harshly punished their publishers
by disabling their account(Forfeiting Their Money) without giving them warning, but now that Yahoo Publisher Network
has joined the mix, and MSN coming soon as well, the contextual ad market has never been more alive, and never more profitable
for publishers.
There are advantages and disadvantages to many of the different networks. This article will look at
three different contextual ad networks that each spin the market in a slightly different way. We will review the benefits
of these networks as well as their disadvantages.
Yahoo! Publisher Network - Still in Beta Testing
Yahoo! is the biggest competition Google Adsense
has seen so far, and if the early habits of the
YPN! (Yahoo! Publisher Network) are any indication of what will be coming, Google should be nervous.
YPN! offers two major
advantages over Google's Adsense program. The first is obvious: revenue per click. The revenue on a per click basis that YPN
pays is, in our tests, significantly higher than Google's revenue per click. Although we cannot go into specifics about how
much either network pays, we can say that YPN has consistently been the highest paying contextual ad network we have participated
in.
The second advantage is the customer service. Yahoo! seems extremely interested in making a serious charge against
Google's stronghold in the small and medium sized publisher base. Unlike Google, Yahoo! offers phone support and is constantly
looking for suggestions. Rather than waiting for people to contact them, however, Yahoo! is actually
pro-actively calling
their publishers to look for feedback. It appears as if they are listening as well.
With these advantages in mind,
YPN! does come with some significant disadvantages. The first is the lack of relevant ads being displayed. Contextual advertising
is successful because it is relevant. It is more than simple advertising, it is actually additional content that users should
be interested in. Google has mastered this concept as Omid Kordestani pointed out
in this interview with John Battelle. Fortunately, YPN!'s relevancy should improve with time and data collection. This is one of the reasons they are still in
beta testing.
YPN! ads also have trouble adjusting to different sizes. Google recently introduced a feature to display
fewer ads while increasing the size of the ads to help a website's CTR. YPN!, on the other hand, tends to cutoff ads with
an ellipses when there is not enough space to display the entire ad. This great hurts appeal of the ad and the apparent relevancy.
YPN! has also chosen a verdana font by default, which does not fit into many website's schemes, although there is reason to
believe that publishers will be able to control which font is used in the future.
With all that said, YPN! is extremely
promising. The problems that they do have can be fixed in their beta phase. If they are able to maintain their relatively
high revenue per click, and improve on relevancy and ad displays, they will become a serious head to head competitor to Google
Adsense.
Chitika MiniMallsWhile every entreprenuer jumped into the contextual advertising space as a Google Adsense clone, there was one
company that found a very profitable niche that Google could not fill. That company is
Chitika. Chitika approached contextual ads from an angel completely different than Google or YPN!. Rather than approach contextual
ads as a regular ad network looking for advertisers and publishers, Chitika advertises existing products in online shopping
malls and earns money through affiliate relationships with these online shopping malls. The publishers make money on a per
click basis, just as they would with Adsense or YPN!, but the revenue per click is not based on a PPC bidding system.
Our
initial fear in trying Chitika was that the revenue per click would not justify the time or effort of implementing the ads.
However, when we tested these ads we found that Chitika actually had a higher revenue per click than most contextual ad networks.
And because the revenue is tied directly affiliate relationships with product based websites, there should be no worries of
advertisers learning how to reduce their cost per click, thus reducing our revenue per click.
The major downside to
Chitika is the same downside that YPN! suffers from: a healthy clickthrough rate. Although it is often mentioned that Chitika
works much better on a product based website rather than a purely informational website, Chitika still seemed to offer a lower
clickthrough rate than most. This may be due to the fact that their ads look more like ads than any of the other ad networks.
Chitika
also needs to improve their reporting statistics. Currently the system is a very simplistic view of total pageviews and total
clicks, along with a daily tally of revenue. For those who are trying to make a living from contextual ads, more detailed
reporting is needed.
Finally, it was pointed out by Darren over at
ProBlogger that Chitika
can be used in conjunction with Google Adsense. There are some requirements to this, but nothing that should hurt your revenue
from either network.
Sign In now For PPC Chitika Mini Malls
CB ProsenseIn the same spirit as Chitika MiniMalls,
CB Prosense is not a traditional
contextual ad market place. CB Prosense does not look for advertisers, and they too base their network on the power of affiliate
relationships.
Unlike Chitika, however, CB Prosense utilizes
Clickbank to power their network.
Publishers who sign up for this network are not paid on a per click basis, but rather are able to hook up their Clickbank
affiliate account and earn commissions off their own ads on their website.
For blogs and other sites that contain
a lot of content, this is an extremely efficient way of making money. The ads that are served have good relevancy, assuming
their is a product in the Clickbank directory that matches your website content. The ads are more customizable than YPN! or
Google Adsense, although they have trouble with custom sizes.
The most obvious downside to CB Prosense is the fact
that it is not a free service. Publishers must pay to use the service. Although they do offer a free service, the ideal option
is the paid service. CB Prosense does not keep a portion of the commissions that you earn, so their earnings are limited only
to the subscription fees collected. Most publishers will recoup this fee fairly quickly.
There are other issues with
CB Prosense such as reporting their ads ability to adjust to different sizes, but the overall product is solid.
Other
Contextual Ad NetworksMost networks, with the exception of YPN! and the upcoming MSN ad network, cannot compete
head to head with Google Adsense. A few are trying, but the reality is that the large advertiser/publisher networks are only
effective when a company the size of Google, Yahoo!, or MSN offers the network.
Contextual advertising is the future
of revenue for many publishers. The introduction of competition from mammoths such as Yahoo! and MSN, as well as the introduction
of specialty networks like Chitika and CB Prosense, offer web publishers a wider variety, and a higher quality, set of ads
to offer their users. This will, ultimately, benefit everyone involved, from the advertiser to the publisher to the user who
clicks on those ads.
