21 Great Advertising Networks For Publishers

21 Great Advertising Networks For Publishers

“How do I make money online?”

Well, to start, go read some articles on the Internet with that phrase in the title. After you recover from the initial bout of soul crushing depression come back here and let me introduce you to the staple of most web publishing based monetization — advertising. The most important thing you can learn about advertising online is that it’s a much richer landscape than Adsense would have you believe. To drive that point home I’ve collected 21 advertising providers covering the gamut of publishing formats.

1. Kontera – In-Text Advertising

Kontera is a good network if you are just starting out as a publisher or if your content is text heavy. You can get into the network throughScribefire or sign up directly, and the code is simple to install. The downside is you will have a ton of double underlined ads at random locations in your text. For some readers it can be a nuisance. This is a great network while you are still at the “I want to pay the server bill” stage.

2. Text Link Ads – Text Link / In-Text Advertising

This network deals in paid text links which typically find their home in your sidebar. There is a lot of upside to Text Link Ads. You don’t need gaudy banners, they pay well and they are generally transparent to your audience. Unfortunately, they are on rather shaky ground Google and using TLA can get you penalized in the engines. For most small publishers this won’t be a significant issue, but if strong positioning in the SERP is absolutely critical for your business, this should be a consideration.

3. Commission Junction – CPA / Affiliate Marketpace

Commission Junction deals in cost per action and affiliate programs. If you run a site that reviews products or otherwise encourages buying behavior, this network can be extremely lucrative. Typically the payouts per action are substantially higher than cost per impression or cost per click networks, unfortunately if your site does not convert viewers into buyers you won’t see a dime. There are tons of affiliate networks out there, commission junction is one of the largest and most well known.

4. Shopping Ads – CPA / Affiliate Marketplace

Think commission junction but with deals through eBay, Amazon and other retail channels. Again, before using this as your primary monetization channel consider your audience. If I am using your site as a pitstop to a purchase, affiliates are a great way to get cut — if, however, your site gives me no incentive to buy anything, don’t expect to see a huge payout from Shopping Ads.

5. Adsense – Contextual Ad Network

The most recognizable ad network on the web, Google’s contextual adsmake up a huge percentage of online advertising. The reason is that they are one size fits all, no matter what your site Google probably has an ad for you. Not only that, their fill rate is superb and they are an easy network to get into. What’s the downside? It’s easy to outgrow them, you will eventually find that Google’s payout for many verticals isn’t as good as you could be making elsewhere. At that point, it might be time to start looking at other providers and using Google as a remnant to fill your unsold inventory.

6. Technorati Media – Rep Agency

This is one of the ad providers we use here at HTSAA. Technorati Media has a fantastic sales and support staff and CPMs I have only seen rivaled by Gorilla Nation and Federated Media. They payout at 50% and they currently sell skyscrapers, leaderboards and rectangles. The downside is that they are difficult to get into (they currently work with about 100 publishers) and because they are new, they have a limited number of campaigns available. If you have a few other providers for your unsold inventory, I can’t say better things about Technorati.

7. Tribal Fusion – Rep Agency

Like Technorati Media, Tribal Fusion is a rep agency so you will have a sales staff behind you trying to sell advertising into your vertical. The result is very competitive CPMs and a fill rate that comes from being behind an established network. Unfortunately, getting into Tribal Fusion isn’t easy. Bad economic times are also causing them to decrease the number of publishers they let in, which will be especially difficult for smaller publishers who might have been just large enough to get in under other conditions.

8. Federated Media – Rep Agency

While I have never worked with Federated Media personally, I will say that they are a premiere agency for top-tier bloggers. They have some of the highest CPMs in the industry and they have a sales staff that is constantly working to drive new, innovative campaigns to their publishers. You will need substantial traction to have a chance to be accepted by Federated Media, but once you get a few hundred thousand monthly impressions it’s worth sending in an application.

9. Gorilla Nation – Rep Agency

Gorilla Nation is another network I haven’t worked with directly, but it has the reputation as one of the best ad providers for medium to large publishers. Like all rep agencies your biggest problem will be fill, they can’t provide hard numbers (since they are different depending on the publisher) but expect to see a 30% fill rate.

10. Forbes Business Network – Rep Agency

Forbes Business Network is specialty ad network for business and finance blogs run by the salespeople at Forbes. I have had a love hate relationship with FBN. They are a great provider of premium advertising, seeing $5 CPMs in some cases. Unfortunately, depending on the month the number of campaigns and their fill rate can be extremely low (under 10%). Forbes is a great addition to the chain, but it is unlikely to be your only ad provider.

11. Performacing Ads – 125 x 125 Marketplace

Performancing is in the business of selling 125 x 125 ads now. For anyone who has spent time in content production, you would know that the 125 x 125 is a hugely popular format for bloggers. Performancing has been a mixed bag, their interface is great and implementation of the code is easy but you still spend a great deal of time waiting for your ad space to be sold. It’s good but not a perfect solution.

12. Voxant – In-Video

Voxant is a provider of video content syndicated from dozens of major news companies including BBC, AP and Reuters. They also have a revenue sharing program that pays publishers for showing their videos. This is a win-win. Not only do you get access to high quality video content, but you also get paid whenever anyone watches it. The only downside is the backend. It’s difficult to track anything and hard to tell whether every view is a paid impression (they use several ad providers and sometimes none at all). All in all it is a great service that has only been getting better over time.

13. Videoegg – Social Network / Widget Advertising

Videoegg has a large inventory of ads for wdigets, social networks and other rich media platforms. It’s a great network for anyone with a traditionally difficult to monetize platform.

14. Social Spark – Advertorial

Social Spark allows advertisers to buy bloggers time and space and get them to write about products and services — that’s right, it’s an advertorial exchange. This is another buyer beware scenario, not because Google will frown on you (the IZEA team worked hard to unruffle those feathers) but because the advertorial model is still young in Blogging circles and there is a lot of backlash associated with using it. Transparency seems to be the biggest takeaway when using a service like this, Social Spark forces it but even without the nudge in the right direction be sure to realize you are playing with your reader’s trust. That being said, I think everyone would do well to realize that advertorial has been in media since the invention of the newstand, it might be time for us to get over ourselves just a little.

15. Review Me – Advertorial

ReviewMe is another Advertorial marketplace with a few less checks and balances as Social Spark. The same rules apply.

16. interClick – Ad Network

While I would have liked a higher fill rate, what I like about interClick is your ability to see just about everything about the campaigns that you are running. They offer skyscrapers, leaderboards and rectangles as well as popup ads (if you’re into that sort of thing). This network should definitely be used

17. Casale Media – Ad Network

Casale Media is a notoriously difficult network to get into, but everything I’ve heard suggest that they run into fewer dilution problems than similar networks.

18. Pheedo – RSS Advertising

When you absolutely, positively must have advertising in every portion of your digital life Pheedo is here to help you place ads in your RSS feeds. Everyone loves getting feed subscribers but they hate the fact that their most valuable readers almost never see their shiny new brand advertisement. I don’t put ads in my feed but I’ve heard that Pheedo is a good (if not particularly lucrative) solution.

19. Magpie – Twitter Advertising

See Ophelia’s excellent post on the matter, coming tomorrow.

20. Pubmatic – Ad Optimizer

Pubmatic isn’t really an ad provider, but it will help you make money. Pubmatic acts as an advertising optimizer, you put in pre-existing tags and it serves the ones that will provide you with the highest CPMs. Typically, they are seeing lifts in revenue from between 10-30%. In practice this is heavily dependent on the networks you are running and how you are choosing to run them.

21. Rubicon Project – Ad Optimizer

Finally let’s look at the Rubicon Project, another ad optimizer that also acts as an ad provider. Using deals with many major networks, Rubicon will not only serve you ads from your stable of providers but will also pick other providers which might provide you with higher CPMs. From what I’ve seen Rubicon is a great tool, but it’s not for everyone. Reporting can be slow and inaccurate, and depending on the number of networks you are trying to setup it can be difficult to get started. Rubicon also needs several hundred impressions to properly optimize your inventory.

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Why social networking alone won't make the sale - iMediaConnection.com

Why social networking alone won't make the sale - iMediaConnection.com

These days we all use some form of social networking. How delightful to go onto LinkedIn and find colleagues from Europe who might have interest in a program with me for when I travel across the pond – colleagues that know me well enough through my various online profiles to be eager to dialogue with me, discover ways to partner, or just chat about places to stay. And the use and quality of Skype has made it all as simple and cheap as calling a friend in a different city.

With automatic trust built in -- we're sort of family once we are connected -- our conversations seem to flow smoothly: We've used Facebook, the net, and Twitter to discover who the other is, have determined whether and how we want to connect, what we can offer each other, and how to prepare. An off-handed comment about the person's upcoming wedding, or a congratulatory mention of the person's new business venture compounds the trust.

Gone are the days of cold calling, running around the country to network, and speaking at events for free just to collect business cards. I bet some folks out there don't even remember when those were the only ways to get leads, other than the phone book.

So why aren't we closing more?

Not only are we not closing more, but we're closing less.

What is going on?

What's going on is that our relationships, communication, trust, and friendliness are not helping others reach the sorts of decisions necessary to close a deal.

Change, systems, and buy-in 

Before we look at what's happening, let's change the discussion for a moment to look at what needs to happen for any purchase to occur.

In order for someone to buy something other than a small personal item, there are several steps that must take place to get the necessary buy-in to move forward. The appropriate buy-in must be acquired from the right people and groups; the rules must be changed to allow for a new set of givens -- vendors and business partners must agree, and job descriptions must match up with the new jobs.

We tend to forget that all purchases are change management problems. And, because a problem is not an isolated event and has been maintained by the people, policies, rules, and politics of the existent environment, there are systemic things that touch the solution that would be affected if a new solution were to enter.

So a new piece of software would seriously affect users, techies, internal consultants, and trainers; training for one group would affect all of the people who touch that group.

And systems prefer to maintain the status quo, even if it means maintaining failure. After all, it has been good enough until now, and everything has bought-in to maintaining it as it is. In fact, our buyers would rather maintain their status quo regardless of what it is costing them, and regardless of the efficacy of our solution; no matter how much they will save with a new solution, it costs more overall to bring in something new.

Remember: If the buyers felt pain, or were ready to change, they would have done so already.

So until -- or unless -- the status quo will accept the addition of something new, and has the capability to manage in such a way that an addition will not create too much unregulated disruption, it will do nothing.

What it takes to close a deal

Currently, our relationships through social networking haven't included the agenda to help the other recognize and manage the different sorts of buy-in necessary to change. But that doesn't mean we can't include that.

I was at a client site recently listening in on a sales call with a prospect who my client had been chatting with for months. It was a lovely call. Laughter, in-jokes, obvious rapport. They were introduced on LinkedIn and tweeted each other daily. Yet, nothing was going anywhere. I wrote a note in front of him, which he repeated:

"We've been chatting for a while now. And the more I get to know you, the more I see the possibility of our working together somehow. What would you need to know about my solution to know if it would fit, and if your colleagues would be willing to consider adding something new to what they are already doing so well?"

The conversation shifted. The man was happy to answer:

"We're starting to go through the process of an M&A, and won't be able to take on anything new for about a year. Can we revisit this in 6 months? At that time there will be new people on board (I might even be gone!), and I don't know what the hierarchy will be, but we can discuss it."

There could be no buy in, no decision team, and most likely no purchase. Does that make you want to continue being "friends" or end the "friendship"? Do you want to ask for a referral? How much time do you want to spend being friendly vs. closing a sale? And how will you know when/if it's time to pull the plug, or ask the hard questions?

We're in a new era. There are no rules -- we're making them up as we go along. So ask yourself:

• What do you want to get out of social media?
• How will you know that one person over another is a prospect?
• At what point is connecting enough, or do you want to connect only with potential prospects or partners?

The capability is in front of us. The choice is ours as to what we want to do with it. We just have to remember that being friendly, evoking trusting relationships, and having hundreds or thousands of friends doesn't make you a better seller.

What would you need to learn differently to add a new skill set to what you're doing online, to help you help your "friends" make their best decisions?

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Ad Network Tracking - iMediaConnection.com

Ad Network Tracking - iMediaConnection.com:

Earlier this month, I wrote about the benefits of adding enhanced tracking to the marketer's website to improve the performance of campaigns with the ad networks. Since then I have received quite a bit of feedback from many different constituencies. The offer to do consulting projects aside (and that did not go unappreciated at all), the main responses I got were thanks for bringing this topic to light, as well as upcoming advances in this space.

The need for change
Much of the response was from many of the ad networks themselves, saying that while many advertisers do implement these pixels, many still do not-- anywhere from 40-60 percent of campaigns still run without this enhanced tracking!

And much of the response, I imagine, was out of frustration, since many of those campaigns falling into that 40-60 percent could perform so much better with this additional tracking in place. And the education needs to happen at various places. First, I wonder if the ad networks all inform and encourage the usage of these pixels. I have to imagine that they would be the first to recommend such tracking improvements.

But more importantly, are the agencies educating their clients on the benefits? In my past client positions, I know my agency did a great job in educating us, but from what I understand, that does not always happen. Whether it is too much hassle or the rush to get a campaign up, it seems many agencies are not letting their clients know about this option. They need to push for it to happen. A client's technology resources can definitely be an issue, but this is such an important step to take.

And clients don't get off the hook here either. Marketers need to make sure this gets implemented before launching an ad network campaign. Why start a campaign without all the proper tools in place?

What's up next?
There are actually many advances coming (or just arrived in beta) in this space. And hopefully these advances will help ease the process in the long run of getting more enhanced tracking live more quickly and efficiently.

The folks at Doubleclick are now in beta with their new Floodlight tracking product. This tag would replace the current Spotlight tag. Instead of the normal Spotlight tag that is placed on the confirmation page of the marketer's site, this new Floodlight tag could serve not only as a tracking tag for all online campaigns, but it will also allow insertion of ad network tags on the DFA side of the equation vs. having to add yet another tag to the marketer's website.

The other huge benefit of the Floodlight tag is that it removes duplication of conversions across sites and ad networks. For instance, if a user clicks an ad with Ad Network #1 today and then the next day clicks an ad for Network #2 and converts from the ad with Ad Network #2, both Ad Networks will get credit for that conversion and the advertiser is possibly paying twice for that one conversion (if it's a CPA buy). The Floodlight tag removes that issue, tracking that conversion, and at the same time calling only the Ad Network pixel where the conversion actually happened.

Now it will take additional resources at the beginning to implement this Floodlight tag. But once implemented, there will be a lot less tech time when adding a new ad network to the plan, and the improvement in conversion counting (removing duplications) will add to the efficiency of your plan.

This all said, Atlas has had a similar product in the marketplace for some time now. And I am sure the other ad servers are in the same development path, or possibly already there. Doubleclick was the one that has hit the radar most recently, and with the volume of ad serving they do, hopefully that will help push these sorts of initiative along even more expeditiously. Buying the right media is a big part of the battle, but being able to track and optimize it efficiently can often make an even bigger impact in the long run.

Pam Stein is CEO of Charlotte's Web Marketing. Read full bio.

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5 Demographic Targeting Tips - iMediaConnection.com

5 Demographic Targeting Tips - iMediaConnection.com: Introduction
Smart and successful web marketers spend their working hours determining how their efforts can drive more traffic, traffic that will result in higher volumes of customer conversion. But the smartest of these marketers get the most out of their budgets by developing online campaigns that target their most desired customers.

How? Demographic Targeting (DT) allows marketers to focus online ads on subscribers with their desired demographics (i.e., profession, industry, company size, gender, age group, household income, ethnicity, et cetera).

Next: How demo targeting works best

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How to Track an Ad Network Campaign - iMediaConnection.com

How to Track an Ad Network Campaign - iMediaConnection.com:

Introduction
Many of us have worked with the ad networks in one way or another. For direct response and brand campaigns alike, we have leaned on the ad networks for efficient pricing, high reach and a plethora of targeting options. But the one mistake many of us make is not investing the time and resources upfront to make these campaigns as successful as they can be.

Working with ad networks, it is crucial to make sure the proper tagging/coding is in place. So, while the advertiser can report on and track the ad networks’ performance in aggregate (via a third party server), the ad network is also able to do their best job for you by seeing which particular sites are performing the best-- based on the advertiser’s particular metrics.

Here's how it's done!

Next: Implement the pixel

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