Should ads be relevant to your site, or to your audience?

Should ads be relevant to your site, or to your audience?
For years, we were told online ads should be relevant to our sites. That never really made sense to me, because it often meant advertising your competition. You’ll notice TV shows don’t run commercials for other networks’ TV shows, right? Why should we advertise websites providing the same type of content we provide? And how ...

Evaluating an ad network 2

Evaluating an ad network
I run various ad networks on my various sites. Every now and then, I evaluate how well they’re performing, and whether I might do better with another network in a particular spot. Recently, I dumped an ad network I’ve been with for years. I’m not going to name them, but I am going to detail ...

How to make Project Wonderful work for you 3

How to make Project Wonderful work for you
I posted a while back that Project Wonderful was pretty cool. I was using it on one of my siteswhich is notoriously hard to monetize, and it was doing better than most ad networks I’ve tried. Then that site’s traffic tripled inside a month, and the PW earnings did not. People weren’t bidding each other ...

MorningFalls just isn’t serious

MorningFalls just isn't serious
Recently, I tried to reopen my old account with MorningFalls, a CPM network. It didn’t work, so I emailed them. Nothing. I called them – no one was home, no way to leave a message. Then I called them again and finally spoke to someone who assured me they would port my old account to ...

Why I’m dumping AdBrite 1

Why I'm dumping AdBrite
Until recently, I had AdBrite running on a couple of my sites and was pleased with the results. Then I set up a new AdBrite slot on two of the sites – a leaderboard. I put the code into my website, and my website broke. Why? Because AdBrite sticks a 14px graphic at the end ...

How to read AdBrite’s “Zone Comparison” tool 1

AdBrite’s “Zone Comparison” tool has been driving me crazy for a while. It always shows a lot less in total earnings than I actually have, so I couldn’t begin to guess which ad zones – or which types of ads (inline, full page, CPM, PPC) were generating my income. Today, for the first time ever, ...

Project Wonderful is pretty wonderful 1

I’ve been playing with Project Wonderful on one of my sites after more than a few people mentioned it to me (I think Empress was among them, but can’t find the original post), and here’s what I’ve found: It takes a while to get going. Give it at least a month before giving up on ...

Survey your advertisers

One of the big disadvantages of third-party ad networks is most of them don’t let you talk directly to the people buying ad space on your sites. When you sell ads directly (or through a third party service that lets you talk to them), take advantage of your ability to ask your advertisers a few ...

Show Your Ad Here opens

Mark’s ShowYourAdHere has opened (yeah, I’m a couple days late to break that news). This is a third-party service to let you set up your own ad zones and sell ad space to customers. Mark is only taking a 25% cut, which I feel is quite fair considering (a) how much the other guys take ...

Making money on content blogs

Most of the advice on making money with blogs refers to blogs about products. How do you make money with a site that attracts lots of people who want to read about your topic but tend to be ad-blind? Is it hopeless? Must it forever be merely a labor of love? Darren at ProBlogger has ...

Google AdSense withholding taxes

If you work with AdSense, you need to know about this: Google Tax Withholding People are trying to figure out the rhyme and reason behind Google withholding taxes on some people’s AdSense income checks, and not on others. It seems to far only to be happening to US residents, but beyond that, there’s little rhyme ...
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