Making money from your website is one of the main objectives for many websites and blogs.  There are many ways to make money online including earning commissions on selling affiliate products, publishing articles on article directories that share revenue with publishers, selling your own products, and more.  However placing ads on your website is one of the most popular ways to make money and offers one of the best earning potentials.

An online advertising network or ad network is a company that connects advertisers to web sites that want to host advertisements. Success of failure depends on selecting the right advertising network for your website.

There are many advertising networks to choose from. Some work better than others. Moreover the performance varies from website to website depending on a number of factors. An ad network that works for one website may not necessarily work for another. Those who earn full time income often rely on a number of sites to make money. Relying solely on one network however, can increase your risks and reduce the overall potential to earn from your website.

Here are 10 Advertising networks that you can use to make money from your website.

Note: Click on image to visit the Respective Ad Network

Terminology Used:

CPC: Cost per click

CPM: Cost per 1000 Ad impression

CPA: Cost per action including sale, registration or form completion.

1. Google Adsense (CPC and CPM)

Google AdSense is a free service that empowers website owners and publishers to earn revenue by displaying relevant ads on a wide variety of online content, including website search results, websites and blogs. Although revenue potential can be limited for smaller sites, there are many profitable websites that earn in millions with Adsesense.

Above all, it is very easy to implement on your website and is still the best performer compared to many other alternatives. You earn a share of revenue every time a user clicks on your ad and in some cases on per 1000 ad impressions.

2. Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)

YPN is yahoo’s version of Google Adsense. Yahoo Publisher Network has been around since 2002. you have to be accepted into the program and create and maintain a quality site. Yahoo publisher Network works in a similar way to Google Adsense and in my opinion pays similar rates. It is still in beta stage however and only open to U.S residents. This is one of its major drawbacks.

With its acquisition of Overture, it offers a range of products and expertise and offers publishers and companies customized solutions to deliver monetisation for your websites and blogs.

3. Double Click -

DoubleClick is owned by Google and is among one of the most trusted and respected providers. It is the preferred advertising program for many publishers and offers detailed reporting, streamlined integration and tailored advertising forwebsites. It comes in two flavours. DoubleClick for Publishers is meant for the biggest online publishers, while DFP Small Business is a simpler and free of charge version for growing online publishers.

Google AdSense account is a technical requirement for creating a DFP Small Business account. It is recommended for publishers who already use Adsense as it can expand on your existing set-up by enabling real-time competition between Google AdSense, third-party ad networks, and other non-guaranteed advertisers for any inventory on your website. DFP Small Business will optimise your revenue by automatically selecting the highest paying ad.

4. Chitika (CPC)

Chitika allows you to display Shopping mall banner advertising on your website, blog, app or mobile site, with content from our high-quality network of advertisers. You can use Chitika Ads with AdSense because Chitika Ads are non-contextual and do not look like AdSense units. It tends to work better for websites with significant U.S. and Canadian search engine traffic.

Chitika offers 4 customizable opportunities to make money. Chitika Premium displays advertisements subject to the search engine query that landed the visitor; Whitespace monetizes extra space in high resolution monitors to display relevant ads in parallel to your website; Linx creates pay per click links within your content; and finally the Referral or affiliate program offers 10% of the income generated by publishers you refer to the program and 25% for advertisers.

5. Advertising.com  (CPA)

Advertising.com is a large established network where earnings are based on Cost per action (CPA) i.e. you are paid when a user completed an action via your ad link. This can be registering on a website, completing a form or purchasing a product.

Advertising.com, owned by the AOL Group, includes top brands including more than 90% of AdAge’s top 100 advertisers. It is a large network that delivers over 140 billion impressions per month and has offices locations are on all 5 continents. They have their own ad serving platform, ADTECH, which makes it easy to manage campaigns across multiple platforms including display, video and mobile.

6. 24/7 RealMedia (CPM)

24/7 Real Media  is a large is an established advertising network that allows you to manage your ad delivery easily and effectively. Participating website publishers can earn money through the network by having relevant ads placed on their sites.It is designed for publishers and advertising network owners who want to get the most value from their ad inventory. You choose which ads are delivered on your site, receive real-time updates on campaign status and easily access comprehensive reports. Revenue is based on CPM which is cost per 1000 impression and cost per click.

7. Burst Media (CPM)

Burst Media was recently acquired by Blinkx, the online video provider. Sites must have minimum traffic of 25,000 monthly page views or 5,000 monthly unique views and provide regularly updated content to be eligible for Burst Media. Relationship with a publisher starts with a detailed engagement plan that sets out the kind of brands publishers want to see on their website.  It offers both CPM and CPC earning models.

There are two models of revenue generation with Burst Media:

• Burst Network – This offers CPM based revenue i.e. you will be paid for every 1000 ad impression on your website. You can select which Ads run on your site.
• Burst Direct – This is designed for quality publishers with more traffic and allows you to directly target advertisers for a fixed rate.

8. ValueClick : (CPM, CPA)

ValueClick Media formerly FastClick  is a large advertising network that can be good for small-to-medium websites. Earnings are based on CPM cost per 1000 impressions and cost per actions (CPA) for affiliate products.

Minimum requirement is of 3,000 page views per month. It offers three main ways for publishers to make money from their websites. These are display ads, affiliate marketing, and referrals. All types are controlled through one panel. Publishers can also earn via referrals whereby when another publisher joins through a user’s site, that user gets a bonus equivalent to 5% of the new user’s earnings for the first twelve months of service.

They offer a number of ad formats including banner ads and pup-under windows ads. They also offer full-page ads that appear when a link is clicked.

Divisions include

• ValueClick Media
• Commission Junction
• Mediaplex

9. Kanoodle (CPC)

Kanoodle offer a 50% payout to publishers based on cost per click. What makes Unlike Adsense, advertisers can choose where they want their ads to appear by selecting specific categories. In addition to Contextual Advertising, they also allow publishers to earn revenue by including a Kanoodle search widget on your site and include ads in RSS feeds.

10. AdBrite (CPC)

Your earnings are based on number of times users click on ads. Publishers receive 75% of revenue share. Adbrite allows publishers to choose the type of ads and even the rates they wish to charge clients. You have the options to approve the ads before they are displayed. Ads displayed on your website are non-contextual and are based on category and keywords defined by you as opposed to being automatically selected based on your content. In addition to text and banner ads, they also offer Full Page Ads, Inline Ads (like Infolinks or Kontera) and InVideo Ads. Adbrite can be helpful if you were rejected by Adsense or if you are a new blogger.

Conclusion:

Above are some of the leading Advertising Networks that allow websites and blogs to make money by displaying ads on their site. There are many other networks that you can use to monetise your website. In the next post we take a look at 10 More Advertising Networks to Make Money online.

The author K.Singh is an E-Commerce Consultant with over 10 years of experience working with established businesses as well as SME’s.  He is current the director of  Web Design & Internet Marketing agency in London.