
Ask HN: AdSense alternatives? - scotchio
A friend and myself run a tutorial blog for a hobby that makes us a very minuscule amount of money via AdSense. It&#x27;s a nice extra incentive to push and grow the blog farther and farther along though.<p>In light of the current drama surrounding AdSense (fabricated or not), and in complete seriousness, what are some alternatives in case we randomly get &quot;shut off&quot;? We have used and are currently using BuySellAds and their Unreserved Program - which depends on a buyer though.
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toddynho
Todd from @BuySellAds here.

An ideal setup is one in which you utilize about a handful of different
companies in the "Tier 2" position. Probably no more than a handful though,
because after that it gets hard to manage and rather convoluted.

Tier 1 is your directly sold ads (stuff you sell on your own directly to an
advertiser or through a company like BuySellAds).

Tier 2 is where the AdSense's of the world will live. It really depends on
your "niche", but in general the best options tend to be: AdSense, Rubicon
Project (if you're big enough), PubMatic (again, if you're big enough), or a
"niche/vertical" ad company that focuses on sites like yours. By-and-large,
AdSense "owns" this space outright, and even if you're using a program like
ours
([http://buysellads.com/publishers/unreserved](http://buysellads.com/publishers/unreserved))
for your "non-reserved" inventory (stuff that isn't sold direct) there's going
to be SOME mix of AdSense (or AdX) in there.

Ad money certainly isn't easy, and more and more is going to go toward those
publishers creating great content and curating high-value audiences (i.e. not
user generated content...). The days of "set it and forget it" are over for
most publishers who aren't interested in earning pennies on the dollar. If you
can't sell ads directly through a service like BuySellAds or on your own,
well, I wish you luck :)

It's not all doom and gloom though - we see publishers make quite a bit of
money all the time. It ultimately comes down to the quality of their site,
it's content, and the users.

~~~
doh
Hm, this is what google shows when you type the name of your company (at least
in safari)

[http://imgur.com/cfdFdvd](http://imgur.com/cfdFdvd)

There is no link to click on

~~~
JamiesonWarner
Try disabling adblock and then try again ;)

~~~
doh
Uff, that's really unfortunate when the adblock block the name of your
company.

~~~
toddynho
Tell me about... _cough_ someone at AdBlock please write a _smarter_ regex for
the default filter... _cough_

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Ryan_Jones
so, I realize this might be seen as spam, but I am always trying out adsense
alternatives and regularly maintain a list of the ones I'm trying out.
[http://www.dotcult.com/best-adsense-
alternatives/](http://www.dotcult.com/best-adsense-alternatives/)

TLDR: casale, Lijit, technorati are working best for me.

~~~
avalaunch
Linking to a page that exactly answers the question being asked is definitely
not spam.

~~~
JeremyMorgan
Exactly, but I could see the concern with posting it. Upvoted for relevance

~~~
CyberShadow
One possible concern is that the article uses affiliate links for every
recommendation.

------
antjanus
Honestly, none of that. Create your own "ad network".

Basically, figure out the theme of your blog and what kind of people it
attracts and then find affiliate programs for that.

For example. Let's say your tutorials are for developers. What do developers
need?

* development tools * hosting * further courses/learning

That will yield a pretty good list of affiliates that will convert well such
as:

* New Relic * Digital Ocean * TeamTreeHouse

(respectively). You'll make much more cash, and it'll work better for your
site. [Checkout my site]([http://antjanus.com/](http://antjanus.com/)) for
instance. I have a TeamTreeHouse ad (affiliate) which makes me a solid $X
every month. The adsense ad underneath makes about $X/100 (it was slightly
better when it was at the top of the sidebar but still made only a fraction of
what the TTH ad made). I also have an ad for Bootstrap themes on my Bootstrap
tutorials. That ad makes about $X/2 BUT my teamtreehouse ad performed at $X/25
for those articles, makes sense?

Anyways, I'm getting rid of adsense in favor of my own "ad network".

 __EDIT __A good example of other people doing this is
[TechPro]([http://tech.pro](http://tech.pro)) (I worked there briefly during
the first sprint to make a pre-alpha whatever) which has its own ad serving
network and directly serves affiliate programs.

~~~
vblord
is a site called AntiAnus safe for me to view at work?

~~~
wlesieutre
It's a j, not an i. A bit tough to tell with the underline there.

------
wiwillia
Have you considered trying another way to monetize? Selling merchandise,
especially if you have an engaged audience, tends to have a higher effective
CPM ($20-100+ in our experience) and can be run simultaneously with ads.

Teespring (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder and t-shirt addict) can be an
effective tool for doing just this. We ship hundreds of thousands of products
each month, you get retail quality products and margins as though you were
paying up front.

Absolutely no risk and no costs. You'll never pay us a penny, we only make
money if you do.

------
gesman
I suggest to come up with your own buyable products (tutorials, how-to's,
etc..) and show half of it (teaser) to everyone and allow to see the rest to
paid members.

Then you may charge per download, or full access based on recurring membership
fee.

You may also offer free membership to capture emails and then market to
interested visitors further.

Whoring your traffic to other people's platforms or products leaves no
residual value to you and makes you vulnerable to other people TOS'es, moods
and playrules.

The point is to use Google what it's good for - to send you prospects.

Your task is to capture prospect's contacts and establish relationships with
them.

Begging for Adsense peanuts is unsustainable strategy as many people are
finding out the hard way.

(PS: I worked on bulding membership site software that allows you to do just
that with a few clicks)

~~~
scotchio
Thanks for your feedback. Yeah, this is probably the direction we will
eventually have to go. I really like this approach, but we'd rather focus on
the content and articles now versus, say, the business side of it - unless it
grows into something bigger.

My other thought was to put new articles up with a community-based bitcoin
paywall. Basically if we receive "X" donations from the community, this
article becomes public forever. I'm not sure how that will be received by our
user base though (tech, web developers).

~~~
gesman
I'm actually the one who created free Bitcoin plugin for Wordpress/WooCommerce
as well :)

[https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-
woocommer...](https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-woocommerce/)

Feel free to utilize it for that purpose. It could be a great strategy.

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Chitika
Hi,

Chitika customer support here! Our ad network is often used by those who
cannot get AdSense approval but who still have high-quality sites. You can
even test us out alongside AdSense -- we've found most publishers who use
Chitika AND AdSense make more money than those who use AdSense alone.

We have search-targeted text, display, mobile, in-text, pop-out, and highlight
ads available to all of our publishers.

Feel free to drop me a line at support@chitika.com if you or your friend have
any questions. We can take a look at your blog and suggest certain ad types &
placements that would work well for your specific blog. :)

~~~
junto
What is your company's policy on ads that automatically open up iTunes or
Google Play if they detect an iOS or Android device.

Because that shady practice is really starting to annoy me.

I've now had to enable parental controls (for myself) and block the iTunes app
to prevent these annoying subversive ads from hijacking my browser on my iPad.

I'd like to see a policy of 1 warning then a ban for ad publishers who use
these underhanded methods.

~~~
Chitika
An ad should never open up an application on your device for you. It should
only direct you to content that you've asked to see (because you made a
decision to click on that ad). We hate annoying ads too! If you do see a
Chitika ad that does this, let us know ASAP so we can remove it and make sure
it's not happening anywhere else.

------
malchow
There are alternatives to AdSense, but the key here is to recognize that
AdSense enjoys its favorable position in part by sourcing advertiser demand
from other platforms. There is a massive and creative ecosystem around
developing technology to suit (and sometimes to drive) the mercurial wishes of
ad agencies. So Google captures this through partnerships. Ad demand that's
actually originated by Google sales is very significant and very high quality,
but there's no doubt that Google is simultaneously interested in serving its
own wholly owned properties.

The best thing to do is to build relationships with 5-9 high quality ad
platforms and waterfall them through passback tags, one to the other.

Good platforms include, but are certainly not limited to:

AOL x+1 AppNexus Turn MediaMath AudienceScience Criteo The Trade Desk

If you're lucky, you can satisfy all requests without sending a single
impression over to AdSense.

If your domain is delivering fewer than 100m impressions monthly, it's
unlikely that the companies noted above will be keen to put personnel on your
account, and may not be able to work with you at all.

However, with intelligent switching, keen arbitrage, and an aggressive
performant waterfall (e.g., you never actually want to pass a request to more
than two or three of these or you'll see packet loss that exceeds the positive
delta you'd have obtained by accessing yet another ad platform) you can do
very well without using AdSense. The company I mentioned below, Publir, was
cofounded by me about five years ago and does what we think is a rather good
job of this. Sites like The Atlantic and others use us for their ads.

We're also terrific fans of BuySellAds, whose self-serve platform is second to
none. There, your goal is simply to do direct outreach to advertisers likely
to covet your audience. Even the finest brand-name publishers only sell about
30% of their ads this way, though, so your expectations ought not be too high.

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thenomad
What's the niche?

It's more work, but you can generate similar levels of income - or sometimes
more - using affiliate programs from sites like Commission Junction,
ShareASale, and Clickbank. You'll need to test and optimise, but the rewards
can be considerable.

------
antr
I have a close friend who went from AdSense to BuySellAds Unreserved and saw a
spike in CPM of c. 60-70%, with quality ads (I think he said these were
primarily retargeting driven). I don't think he is going back to AdSense.

~~~
toddynho
Very cool - always great to hear about people doing well with our Unreserved
program! Thank you for sharing with the HN crowd.

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Sir_Cmpwn
MediaCrush ([https://mediacru.sh](https://mediacru.sh)) uses Project
Wonderful. We describe our reasons here:
[https://mediacru.sh/advertising](https://mediacru.sh/advertising).

In short, they are pro-user and generally seem like good guys, and they give
us a lot of control.

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mdprasadeng
[http://www.media.net/publishers](http://www.media.net/publishers)

media.net, my previous company. We used to consider ourself in competition
with adsense. They have some big name customers like forbes, cosmopolitan etc.

~~~
borat4prez
I recently split my ads (50% AdSense | 50% Media.Net) on one of the blogs I
maintain and they both earn very close to the same amount every day. I like
the service.

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hurlio333
Agree with Todd's general setup. CPM's on display ads are in a death spiral
thanks to a glut of inventory and programmatic buying/targeting options.

Particularly for a tutorial site I would consider paid, clearly marked
sponsored tutorials that you produce and keep full editorial control over. In
moderation it can work well and still have educational value for readers and
drive results for advertisers way beyond any display ads, and significantly
more revenue for you. Full disclosure I handle direct ad sales for publishers
with this exact same model at TechCrowds.com (including representing a few
BuySellAds publishers)

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higherpurpose
For ads, I don't think others pay quite as well, and even those that come
close, usually require at least 100,000 uniques a month or something like
that.

But if it's not too irrelevant to that topic, I suggest combining whatever ad
network you have with Amazon affiliate links. It helped me double my Adsense
income for the same traffic.

Ultimately, if you have some quality service or content that you can sell,
membership/subscription model is the best. I know someone who just gave up on
Adsense, and was making 10x the Adsense revenue from subscriptions.

~~~
toddynho
Indeed, there are many folks doing this very successfully. It's certainly not
for everyone though, and does require a bit of work. We actually work with a
bunch of folks who are doing this successfully over at a side-project of ours:
[http://syndicateads.net](http://syndicateads.net)

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cyborgx7
Are there any ad networks that don't track the people looking at your site?
That would be a valuable feature to me.

~~~
Johnie
You're basically asking to show ads that are even more irrelevant and useless
to your users?

The best ads for publishers and users are ones that are relevant. If you want
to display something that is irrelevant to the user and ineffective for the
advertiser, you might as well not display ads at all and avoid annoying your
users.

~~~
cyborgx7
What if they show ads based on the focus of the site instead of information
about the user?

~~~
dfgonzalez
You can, there are plenty of XML feed providers who will provide you an XML of
ads relevant to the keywords you provide, which you collect server side and
display to your users.

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dublinben
Have you considered working directly with the most relevant advertisers for
your niche market?

~~~
marymarks
Thats what I ended up doing after my AdSense account was banned and I couldnt
find a good alternative to match my sites.

Its a hit and miss though. Nothing like what I was earning with AdSense.

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Amatewasu
I launched few months ago an alternative to AdSense: PandAd.
[https://pandad.eu](https://pandad.eu)

However we focus a French public for the moment. But we try to do not track
visitors of our publishers.

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sergiotapia
I had a website that had around 50,000 hits/month and made about $150/month
with no input from me. We used the ad network called Project Wonderful. It's
simple to use and manage.

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malchow
You could try Publir.com. (Disclaimer: I'm cofounder.)

~~~
owenversteeg
This doesn't look like an AdSense alternative. I think most people are looking
for something that they can click a button, get a <script> tag they can drop
in their page, and earn a few dollars a month to offset the cost of hosting.
Your site looks like something catering to large publishers.

p.s. The landing page makes me confused on exactly what it is that your site
does.

~~~
malchow
Yeah -- with Publir, we want to speak with every applicant first. But aside
from that, it is more or less as simple as us generated a <script> tag and
sending that over.

~~~
livestyle
@malchow I work at BSA and would love to chat with you guys. Good way to
connect?

~~~
malchow
@livestyle Would love to talk. I'm at joe (at sign) publir.com. Let me know
that you came through YC.

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MicroBerto
If you're in health/fitness/nutrition/diet, we have some tools using the
PricePlow API. Buzz me if so and good luck!

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jordsmi
Depends on the type of traffic, but I think it's best to just push CPA offers,
or actual products from places like cj or clickbank

~~~
vittore
Do you know other places like clickbank?

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whatnow0
Does anyone know of an ad network which pays out in Bitcoin but targetted
towards general users? Coinurl, a-ads etc have an extremely low CTR because
they are targetted to only Bitcoins users.

Are there any plans for popular ad networks to payout in Bitcoin anytime soon?

Another solution would be to use affiliate programmes such as
Privateinternetaccess but once again, it would generate a low CTR I would
presume.

~~~
toddynho
We've had some folks request to be paid out in Bitcoin. We're open to doing
this once we have a handful more (or so) ask for it... the tricky thing is
that you then have to play the exchange rate game and withdraw money from
BuySellAds when it's "favorable" for you to do so, since the advertisers
aren't actually paying you in Bitcoin.

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Eleutheria
I wish Mozilla started their own ads platform for Firefox OS.

It looks promising.

------
maxsavin
SEO is on the way out, and AdSense is too expensive. Social media is the new
SEO, check out this book for the insider tips:
[http://massivefollowing.com](http://massivefollowing.com)

~~~
eightofdiamonds
Do you know what AdSense is?

