Just as my own personal anecdote, I've found that CPC AdSense style ads are near worthless, at least on non-targeted sites. I've had ads on the forums of my medium-sized site (http://starmen.net/forum/) and not received very much money.
The AdSense ads a lot of times don't even make sense. If you look today, there's a lot of ads about termites, which really is only visible in the title since a goofy server administrator changes the title to a random movie quote every once in awhile. Originally there was a lot of ads for 'mothers', but that's only because it's a website dedicated to the MOTHER video game series.
Of course I'm in the unholy combination of 14-25 year old technically-savvy viewers who pay no attention to advertising at all, whether by willful ignorance or intentional AdBlock. It's why Facebook can't generate any cash: Anybody below the age of 25 does not click on ads at all.
A lot of ad networks suck big time. AdSense is decent if your site is content oriented, e.g. articles about specific thigns or whatever. If you run a service like I do however (getclicky.com) then these types of ad networks don't work at all. Plus AdSense seems to be real anal and your account can get canned at any time without explanation and no chance of getting it back. Wow, that's fun.
A lot of ad networks also have a 30-90 day pay delay which sucks when you're just getting started.
If you have a decent amount of traffic, say at least 2,000 daily visiors or 20,000 daily page views, you should be able to sell ads directly without any problem. You set your own price and cut out the middle man and swim in the money.
However the problem with this is that you have to deal with inquiries all the time, worry about billing (unless you have an automated billing system setup already for something else that you can integrate ads into as well). So this service came along called BuySellAds.com that we now use on getclicky.com for our ads. We still set the price and decide how many ads we want to sell, what size, etc. And they deal with all teh billing and take a 25% cut. I think that's reasonable for the automation they provide. Before we switched to them I was dealing with advertising billing and inquiries for many hours every month. They also allow you to cash out at any time. Because of this I highly recommend the service.
You can choose more than one. A site I run shows adverts from about 10 ad networks. It's more to manage, but it's worth it to get the full range of offers out there.
Also quite often you'll find advertisers are on multiple networks, offering different rates because of the networks differing cuts.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 24.2 ms ] threadThe AdSense ads a lot of times don't even make sense. If you look today, there's a lot of ads about termites, which really is only visible in the title since a goofy server administrator changes the title to a random movie quote every once in awhile. Originally there was a lot of ads for 'mothers', but that's only because it's a website dedicated to the MOTHER video game series.
Of course I'm in the unholy combination of 14-25 year old technically-savvy viewers who pay no attention to advertising at all, whether by willful ignorance or intentional AdBlock. It's why Facebook can't generate any cash: Anybody below the age of 25 does not click on ads at all.
A lot of ad networks also have a 30-90 day pay delay which sucks when you're just getting started.
If you have a decent amount of traffic, say at least 2,000 daily visiors or 20,000 daily page views, you should be able to sell ads directly without any problem. You set your own price and cut out the middle man and swim in the money.
However the problem with this is that you have to deal with inquiries all the time, worry about billing (unless you have an automated billing system setup already for something else that you can integrate ads into as well). So this service came along called BuySellAds.com that we now use on getclicky.com for our ads. We still set the price and decide how many ads we want to sell, what size, etc. And they deal with all teh billing and take a 25% cut. I think that's reasonable for the automation they provide. Before we switched to them I was dealing with advertising billing and inquiries for many hours every month. They also allow you to cash out at any time. Because of this I highly recommend the service.