Different Kinds of Ad Income

You DO have choices other than Google. But none of them WORK quite the way Google does.

Yahoo has minimum site traffic requirements, AND, they have a more prohibitive content policy. I do not know if they compare in earning potential, because I cannot qualify for traffic amounts (I have a network of sites, but none alone can qualify), and virtually every site I have mentions morals or family safe policy or Christian friendly or something they would not like (Yahoo does not like for you to have an opinion that does not agree with theirs).

Kanoodle apparently has more publishers than advertisers. If you try to sign up, they may never approve you.

Several others, which I cannot remember by name, have similar restrictions to Yahoo.

Many of them require that you place their code on your site, which will just read "advertise on this site" until someone decides to. Of course, they usually let advertisers select you from a list when they register also, but with so many sites out there, and so many BIGGER sites out there, who is going to bother?

Some of the companies that require manual selection of the publishing site also use a bidding process, but it is not really a competitive bid. They will usually let you say how much you want per click, or per impression, or whatever, but they will also let advertisers bid different amounts (read lower). So it ends up being a negotiation between you and the advertiser, rather than competition for the keyword across multiple sites.

As an alternative to this, you can operate your own advertising program. This means you set up a method of pricing and managing ads on your own sites. Such a program requires some means of tracking who has paid and who has not, as well as actually posting the ads. You can manually ad them as static HTML ads, or you can use a script to rotate them. Generally static ads have a higher value.

If you set up your own program, you also have to be able to offer page view stats. Not a big deal if you are tracking stats already.

I periodically go and search for alternatives to Google. Partly because I like to test things to report on them, and partly because if Google were to ever decide to dump me, I'd want to have a backup! But so far, nothing else has come close in making it easy for me to earn from my infosites.

Still if you don't like how Google does business, there are many alternatives out there. Check out a few and see if you can find one that is more to your liking.

Written by Laura Wheeler
Owner, Firelight Web Studio
http://www.firelightwebstudio.com 
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