What Else Can You Use, Besides Google Adsense?

When Google launched AdSense for webmasters way back in June 2003, AdWords was still new, people had no clue what contextual advertising meant or how it worked, and most importantly, no one had provided a similar service for the average webmaster (like you and me) for free so far. Two and half years later, things have changed. AdSense has become massive; more and more people everyday are buying into the possibility of earning money, serious money through Google AdSense. A lot of this has to do with the high competition for keywords on AdWords – as advertisers bid higher and higher, clicks on your site’s AdSense ads become more and more valuable. In addition, a large number of services have sprung up to offer similar advertising services. Other pay-per-click advertising sites have been quick to follow the Google model, offering contextual advertisements just like AdSense. What’s more, alternative site advertising models have sprung up, most notable being the contextual algorithms used by Kontera and Vibrant Media, and the product advertising by Chitika, Commission Junction and CBProSense, amongst others.

Google AdSense is still the largest revenue network, and with AdWords being the most popular PPC program available, there’s still great potential for AdSense revenue on your website. Still, you may feel like AdSense is not the thing for you. Maybe you don’t like Google. Or maybe, like me, you’re looking to maximize the revenues from your website. In other words, you may have a number of reasons for looking at advertising alternatives to Google AdSense. In today’s lesson I’ve picked out three serious alternatives for you to consider in place of AdSense. These are:

* Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)

* Kontera

* Chitika eMiniMalls

Each occupies a different “niche” within the site advertising model – and it’s worth noting that all three may work best for one type of site, but not too well for others.

Yahoo Publishers Network

Yahoo! Publisher Network (or YPN for short) is Yahoo’s response to Google AdSense. In effect, YPN works almost exactly like AdSense – insert a piece of JavaScript code into your site pages, and then wait for the YPN bot to crawl your site and pretty soon you have contextually relevant ads being displayed on your site. YPN is still in beta, and in terms of features, it shows as there are several features available in AdSense that seem to be missing in YPN (lesser ad format options, clunkier code generation, limited color palette options, a limit of 50 ad channels). However, YPN trumps AdSense with one feature that webmasters have been clamoring for ever since Google launched AdSense – the ability to transfer funds from YPN to Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), provided that you use the same login/email information on both accounts. This is huge in terms of attracting webmasters, but since YSM is still a few steps behind AdWords in popularity, Yahoo will need to do more to attract AdSense users.