Reasons Why You Should Explore Alternates to Adsense

While the king of internet publishing advertising networks remains Google’s AdSense, there are other ad networks that can make you more money. You should not only optimize the design of your ads, but also the network serving them.

You should test and retest different advertising networks (like AdBrite, Adsense, YPN, etc.) until you find that you have optimized your EPC (earnings per click). Once you’ve done that, test and retest again. Don’t just assume that you are going to make the most money using AdSense . . .

Use YPN if Your Audience is from the USA

YPN is still not paying publishers for clicks outside the US, so if your site concentrates on an international audience, it is probably not the network for you. If you do have a sizable concentration of viewers in the United States, I highly suggest trying it out.

Here’s one reason why:

This weekend I removed my AdSense ads from one of my blogs and replaced it with YPN ads. Although traffic was slow (happens on the holidays), my advertising revenue for the blog was over twice that of an average day while I served AdSense. I have many months of data to review, but the numbers speak for themselves. I’m going to obviously continue to watch the blog and see how things continue.

My Complaint with YPN

The only problem I’m having with YPN, and one of the reasons why I believe the network is not respected by the online world yet is that there still seems to be a lack of advertisers. I’ve noticed the same 5 ads running on site each time I’ve visited. This can certainly get old to our viewers. I hope that Yahoo can get their act together and start competing with Google; right now, they are not even in the same league. I think it is time for a radical restructuring; Yahoo needs to target publishers and give them a reason to switch over, or they should consider selling off their ad network to someone who can come up with some fresh ideas to compete with Google. At this rate, sadly, it looks like they are going nowhere and fast.

Why AdSense?

Like I mentioned earlier, while my Google ads are not paying as much as YPN ads, there is a much greater inventory. I have a feeling that the increase in revenue I’m seeing from YPN will be short-lived. As my readers find that the ads have grown stale, they will stop visiting them. The benefits of greater inventory, in my mind, will prevail over the long term for this reason.