Last week, we talked about Google Adsense for Content. Ready for more?
I ran ads from Adbrite for quite a while on my blog, Kerflop. I experimented with them a little bit on my business websites, including Very Baby, but found they slowed down the load times too much. I liked Adbrite, I was able to approve or disapprove advertisers, set my own rates, and choose whether or not to display text link ads only or allow banner ads.
Adbrite also offers an intersitial ad option which is as annoying as all get out and breaks possibly every single accessibility standard out there. It's an ad that takes up your whole screen with a link at the top, telling your visitors to click through to continue to your website. I did run these ads for maybe a week, just to see. And the vote was unanimous, my readers HATED them. But I mention them here because holy crap, do they pay well. I made $120 to $150 per month with Adbrite on Kerflop.com, where my traffic fluctuates wildly from 1,200 to 2,500 unique hits per day.
The nice thing about these ads is that people don't necessarily have to click them in order for you to get paid. However, the advertisers pay you based on how much traffic you get in a day or week. But, because Google rules the world, companies like Adbrite have to comply with Google's terms in order to keep you from getting kicked off Google or losing your Adsense account (if you're running it simultaneously). So, just be careful. If you get an angry letter from Google and your Adsense account and search engine rankings are important to you, do what they say.
Some really annoying people (such as myself) stick ads in their feeds to try to squeeze some pennies from those of you who insist on reading their lovingly crafted posts through a feed reader instead of clicking through and giving them some pageview/hit lovin'. I've only ever used Feedburner to display ads in my feed.
These ads, at least for me, pay pretty pithily. As a reference point, according to Feedburner, I fluctuate between around 880 and 904 Kerflop subscribers per day. And I make approximately $20 per month from my feed reader ads. I would take them down out of sheer embarrassment for the poor performance, but they are nice because I don't ever think about them being there. Ads on my website are kind of in my face. I have to design around them, fuss over stats… but my feed reader ads, I can stick 'em in there and forget about it.
What about BlogHer, you ask? Yes, they are everywhere. I recently succumbed to these after taking ALL ads off of Kerflop.com for a brief period. Why BlogHerAds? Because they pay per EYEBALLS. Which is rad. What that means is, instead of slapping the code up and praying for someone to take a sudden interest in bean-filled silk eye pillows and click on the ad, you can slap that code up and just do your thing. When someone comes to your website and views the ad, you get a percentage of whatever the advertiser paid to run the ad.
BlogHerAds was closed to the public during their beta phase, but now all of us blogging lowlifes can sign up, regardless of our readership sizes.
I have only just received my first check from BlogHer Ads, and for half of the month of October (I started running them half way through the month), I made about $250. So for a full, normal month, I'm anticipating $400 to $500. We'll see.
About the Author:
Jessica is an entrepreneur raising three noisy children in the middle of potato country. A self-taught freelancing web designer, Jessica also owns and runs a business with her husband, Very Baby.
She likes dark chocolate, dislikes most forms of housework, and writes about her daily life at Kerflop.com.
