

Ask YC: Other than Google Adwords, what is the best form of paid advertising? - mannylee1

I am helping with a stealth startup that will use Adwords predominantly for its advertising.  What other effective paid advertising tools are out there.  Creative responses would be great too.
======
gscott
For paid ads, I like searching the Adbrite.com directory for bargains. Find
sites with 500 to 5000 hits a day. Pay the default .05 cents per CPM and you
will be paying .05 to .25cents a day to reach all of those people. Finding the
right sites is a bit of a challenge but you only have to find a few sites and
stick with those to drive new traffic to your site every day.

------
PStamatiou
<http://inthesidebar.com> is a recently-launched ad network targeting
developer/designer crowds. (disclosure note: i am one of their publishers)

there is also the deck <http://decknetwork.net/>

<http://adify.com> is the head honcho but I haven't had a good experience with
them.

------
jey
I have had great luck with StumbleUpon advertising, but it really depends on
the site you're trying to promote. The problem with SU is that you need to
capture the user in the first few seconds, or they're just going to click
"stumble" and bounce to the next site. But if you do have a
fun/interesting/cool site, SU is a great source for consistent and cheap
traffic ($0.05 per visitor).

------
deathbyzen
How about <http://www.projectwonderful.com/> ?

I actually used it once to advertise my blog. It worked fairly well, but I
wasn't really interested in advertising my blog; I was just interested in
trying Project Wonderful.

------
staunch
Stick with AdWords initially and worry about it more later. Until you have a
significant amount of traffic no one cares about you. Once you do have traffic
you can try out a bunch of ad networks until you find the best one(s) for your
site.

------
jfornear
Federated Media is popular among tech-targeted sites. You can check out their
publishers here: <http://www.federatedmedia.net/authors/index>

------
larryfreeman
There's also interesting affiliate programs. Everyone knows about Amazon's
affiliate program. There's also Linkshare.com that represents a large number
of web sites as well as numerous web sites that have an affiliate link.

~~~
sachinag
We use Share A Sale for our (newly launched) affiliate program. However, the
bigger sites generally aren't in their network, so you don't get top tier
placement across the web.

------
josefresco
I'd look into serving ads (using your own system) with affiliate codes built
in that target the niche your startup is servicing.

Payouts tend to be higher than AdWords, but are based on actions not clicks.

------
revicon
You should check out right media, their ad exchange (soon to be Yahoo AMP)
pulls in multiple ad networks. <http://www.rightmedia.com/>

------
noodle
really depends on what your app does and what market it targets. there are
tons of specialized ad networks that work to maximize revenue based on what
you're doing.

or you could go down the route of obtaining sponsors/advertisers yourself, and
managing ads on your own. cut out the middleman, get a bigger profit, but have
to deal with the overhead of it yourself.

------
morbidkk
<http://www.lookery.com>

though I don't know how effective it is

------
prakash
use pubmatic.

------
agentbleu
check out appsavvy

