KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays by Comm, Joel (free e books to read .TXT) 📕

This is something that’s unique to YPN, and it lets you select the advertising categories that you think would interest your readers most. There are about 20 categories and 127 subcategories to choose from. You can even place one page in one category and another page in a second category.

That’s a neat trick and a good way to sidestep Yahoo!’s problematic contextualizing, but it’s not enough to make YPN a direct competitor for AdSense.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aware of YPN or how it works. Google can be very sensitive in its attitude toward click fraud, and its review process can be slow and opaque. If you find—for whatever reason—that you receive one of those horrible messages informing you that your account has been shut down, then you should know that YPN is there as a backup. The formats are similar enough for you to be able to just plug in the new units to fill the space that AdSense left on the pages, but you’ll have to work a lot harder—especially with contextualization—before it fills the gap in your income.

MICROSOFT CONTENTADS

Yahoo! should have been the competition publishers wanted to keep Google on its toes. It looks like that space could well be filled by Microsoft (Figure 3.9).

The software company is a relative newcomer to the world of online ads. Its ad units were only seen in the wild for the first time in 2007, a full seven years after Google started placing ads next to its search results.

Microsoft’s ContentAds (www.advertising.microsoft.com/publisher) follow the same model as AdSense and YPN. The ads appear in units that can be formatted and optimized, and they are then placed in search results on Bing and across the company’s publisher network. For the moment, that publisher network is restricted, and so is the ad inventory.

Figure 3.9Microsoft tries to out-Google Google with its ContentAds.

Microsoft is currently only accepting publishers based in the United States who have American tax numbers. The company is being selective about who it accepts, and even the ad formats are restricted to 10 different kinds of text ads. There are no image ads, let alone any of the fancy, creative products available from AdSense.

The impression is that Microsoft sees ContentAds as a long-term rival to AdSense. It’s building slowly, putting the infrastructure it needs in place as it tries to eat up some of Google’s market share.

That’s good news for publishers. While it’s still too early to tell whether Microsoft really will be able to give Google a run for its money, it’s good to know that there is a real alternative. Once your site is up, running, and generating reasonable amounts of traffic, it is worth asking to join Microsoft’s beta network. You might decide that you don’t want to use it, but you should have it ready if you ever need an alternative to AdSense.

ADSDAQ

AdSense, YPN, and Microsoft’s ContentAds all deliver CPC ads. (You might get the odd CPM ad with AdSense, but they’re relatively rare and tend mostly to turn up on large sites with lots of traffic.) The same is true of both Chitika and Kontera. All of these services rely on users being interested enough in an ad to click on it and head to the advertiser’s web site.

That’s one way to make money from a site, and it’s a very important way. But there are other methods that you can use, and they increase your ability to monetize your users. One of those methods is CPM ads.

Cost-per-mille ads pay a set fee for every thousand times an ad is shown. Usually the payments, measured per user, are very small. Two bucks per mille might be considered a reasonable amount, but it means that you’re earning just one-fifth of one cent every time the ad is shown. You’ll need to show the ad lots of times to make any decent money that way.

But when you’re getting tens of thousands of impressions per day, you will be showing the ads lots of times—and you will be making some nice additional income. Best of all, you won’t have to do anything to get that income. To make the most of CPC ads, you have to test different optimization strategies and track the results. It can take time and effort before your ads are really running and earning at full tilt.

CPM ads earn at full tilt the moment they’re on your site. As long as the traffic is flowing, the KaChing will keep ringing. And because users only have to see the ads for you to earn from them—they don’t have to click, let alone buy—you can put them in the kind of spots that are usually ignored by users. The reason that so many sites have banner ads at the top of the page is that these locations are hard to miss but easy to ignore. Users see them but they don’t click on them. That makes the spots poor performers for CPC ads but very useful for advertisers who mostly just want people to know they’re around.

When it comes to choosing a CPM network, you’re spoiled for choice. There are dozens of networks around that are happy to act as intermediaries, matching web sites to advertisers. Unfortunately for publishers, when it comes to choosing those web sites, those intermediaries are spoiled for choice, too. The result is that many networks have minimum demands for the number of page views a site must generate in order to qualify. Adtegrity (www.adtegrity.com), for example, requires at least half a million page views a month, half of which must come from the United States.

AdsDaq (www.adsdaq.com) is one of the few networks that make no view demands of publishers (Figure 3.10). Even if you’re just starting to build up your traffic, you can apply to AdsDaq and start showing CPM banner ads on your site. You won’t get much money for them—not until your traffic starts to