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For a non-bullshit advertising provider I highly recommend http://www.projectwonderful.com/

You create an ad box with them, they give you a snippet to past anywhere on your site. People bid a-la eBay for any amount of time they want to display an ad on that box and you rake in money.

You can then transfer that money via Bank or Paypal, couldn't be simpler and it has gasp customer service!

Fuck Google.

4 comments

There are very very very few situations where anyone will "rake in money" with sites like Project Wonderful. If you're a very specific type of site (have adverts in prime locations and have an audience that is visiting your site looking for something presented in the advertisements) you might make money, but otherwise PW and alternatives will make you a pittance.

Take a look at their top sites list... MS Paint Adventures (a super popular webcomic) has "3,671,690 Average Page Views (past 5 days)" and costs $35 per day. $35 per day for 3.6 million page views?

The highest per day website on Project Wonderful is minecraftservers.org making $100 per day. That is not "raking it in" in any sense of the phrase.

The problem with AdSense is not that there are no alternatives (there are plenty - chitika, adbrite etc.) The problem is that those alternatives pay way, way less. All the customer service in the world isn't going to help if your website makes 10x more with AdSense than with any other ad broker.

I don't know about chitika, but I used adBrite and never saw a dime from it, whereas I was able to make a modest amount with Project Wonderful. Not as much as AdSense, but unlike AdSense, Project Wonderful never accused me of fraud and then ran off with over $300 that I had earned through their service. If I had known how Google would treat me, I never would have signed up, regardless of how much I made in the meantime.

It was really easy to make a tiny amount of money from adbrite.

The minimum payout is only $5 iirc, which is much more easily attained than the $100 from adsense even though they pay less per click. The annoying thing is the 90 day delay.

Conversely one thenth of a google at the competitor is better than 0 from google.

Out of curiosity do you know any stats on ad earnings from them vs Google Ads? As I'd imagine for the majority of people they're looking for maximum return, and willing to cope with the lack of customer service.

(I have no stake in it, I use no ad networks but I am genuinely curious).

The problem is that with AdSense, there is no "coping". The lack of customer service means that once their algorithms decide that you are breaking the rules, your account is just gone, along with any money earned since the last payout. If you're going to rely on AdSense for revenue, you had better have another ad service in the chamber.

I love projectwonderful and think their interface and service are great, but they just don't have the penetration, the publishers are all tiny, they need a bigger sales team or something, go out and find more and better publishers.