SpottedWalrus

For those of you looking to get into the ad game, here are some of the top ad networks you can be a part of. Note that these are based off of my personal experience over the years. The amount of traffic your site gets as well as the quality of your content will strongly affect your rates.

Tribal Fusion - My average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) with these guys has always been higher than the other ad networks. I’ve had a few targeted campaigns for my sites, but not enough to be a deciding factor. They have a notoriously clunky interface that’s reported to be getting a face lift in the coming months. Despite the bad UI, the quality of their ads tends to be on the higher end with fewer of the flashing “You’ve just won a DVD player! Now forfeit your soul!” ads. They require a minimum of 2,000 unique visitors per day for most categories, though some more saturated categories can be as high as 10,000-20,000.

ValueClick Media - Formerly known as Fastclick, ValueClick Media has one of the best user interfaces in the business. Extremely easy to use. They accept just about any site with traffic…and I’m not really suggesting that as a good thing. I’d say a solid half of their ad fill is of the “annoying” genre. But despite some of their ads being lower quality, there are still quite a few good ads available and they’re definitely at the top of my list.

BurstMedia - BurstMedia (or rather their interface) has become known as one of the worst ad management interfaces in all the advertising world. It’s just plain spine cringing. They’ve been lowered to one of my bottom tier networks in my line up of ads solely based on how horrid their interface is. If they were at the top of my tier I’d have to spend time in the interface filtering out ads I don’t want…and that would put me in a bad mood. But interface aside, they are one of the few ad networks that can really hook you up with some killer targeted campaigns. I’ve had some campaigns with them with CPM’s in the $20-30 range…so I can’t complain about that. If you can withstand the horrible interface, these guys have some quality ads running.

Casale Media - Casale has only been a major player in the network game for a couple of years now, but they gained quite a bit of popularity at launch because their user interface is so easy to use. It was (and still is) compared a good bit to the network formerly known as Fastclick (now ValueClick Media). Unfortunately their wonderfully easy interface is plagued by low paying, flashy “You’ve just won 97 DVD players!” and a large number risque ads.

And there we have it! I know, I know…”What about AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network?” Well I purposely left them out. I don’t really consider them “ad networks” mainly because the user has much less control over what advertisers end up on their site. It’s more like “Here’s a code snippet to drop in your site, we’ll show you the advertisers that pay us the most money.” I personally prefer to have control over what end up on my site down to the pixel…so I’ll leave the contextual ad networks out of the game for this post.

Another thing you might have noticed is my harping on the user interfaces of each ad network pretty heavily. I didn’t do it only because user interface design happens to be a passion of mine, but more to say that a good user interface can go an extremely long way. Take Casale for instance, their ads are 99% bile, but I still use them because it’s extremely easy to filter out that 99% and use the 1% to put some quality advertisements on my sites. On higher traffic sites, that 1% really can be a signifcant amount.

What works for me won’t necessarily work for you. These types of ads are generally impression-based and are rarely content targeted. Think of these types of ads as being more like the billboards you see driving down the highway. They’re much less targetted but ultimately reach more people and have the potential make a a large amount of money.

In a future post I’ll cover a much wider spectrum of ad opportunities…especially some that could work better for the average blogger.