Google dominates the advertising space. And that means that its AdSense service for publishers outranks all similar alternatives in terms of its payouts, access to advertisers and quality of ads. They do, however, have program policies that sites need to meet before the system approves an AdSense account.
There are other challenges. A major one is that AdSense is quick to ban you if you violate any of their policies. Moreover, online chatter suggests that there is no easy way of appealing or overturning that block. This makes it effectively a life-time ban.
Alternatives to AdSense
Luckily, AdSense is not the only source of advertisements for publishers. There are several alternatives you can use if you don’t meet AdSense’s criteria, or if you’re under a ban. Each of these services has its own unique characteristics.
Among the most important of those are:
- the kind of ads that they will display,
- the different sets of advertisers you get access to,
- the languages that they work with, and
- how they optimize the content of those ads.
The latter point is vital because ads ought to both be relevant to visitors and to load fast. If either doesn’t work out, you’ll be missing out on users and revenue.
Given this variety of offerings, it’s a good idea to dive deep into the details. It pays off to invest the time to find the best service for your particular blog or website. This applies not only to the content you host, but also the profile of your website’s visitors.
Thankfully, many of these services are quick and free to register and start working with. This means it’s not too difficult to experiment with each and see which ones work best for you. Typically, they will give you at least a week to optimize the service to your needs based on how their ads behave on your website.
Here is a short list of top AdSense alternatives. We selected these particular providers because they have high publisher ratings. The most important criteria are payouts, volume and ease of use.
Infolinks
Infolinks provides in-text, in-fold, in-tag and in-frame text advertising features. The in-text feature is a particular highlight: It means that Infolinks will add some hyperlinks to keywords in your blog’s text. These links will lead to advertisers’ websites. Since they’re unobtrusive, they’re well-tolerated by visitors.
The approval process is fast and they will send you payouts through your choice of PayPal, Wire, eCheck or Western Union. The minimum payout is $50, which is the highest out of those on this list. Infolinks is featured in several top AdSense alternative lists, showing its popularity among publishers as an AdSense alternative.
Chitika
Chitika is said to be extremely similar to AdSense in the way it works. It allows users to customize the ad-type, has a low payment threshold ($10 via PayPal), and provides access to Yahoo! and other top quality advertisers. Additionally, you can use Chitika and AdSense together. Users have lauded the contextual content of Chitika’s ads that helps generate more clicks as well as the ability to customize advertisements’ formatting to your preference.
RevenueHits
RevenueHits is another popular alternative to AdSense, regularly featuring on the top of lists of such alternatives published by bloggers. The service claims to have worldwide coverage and the highest eCPMs paid to bloggers. It is free and quick (30 seconds) to register and start making money. Their platform works with the content and the performance of ads to optimize revenue for your blog by adapting to your users. You would have the option of different ad types: display ads, pop ups as well as apps and widgets. Payout can be wired ($500 minimum) or transferred via PayPal or Payoneer ($20 minimum).
Adversal
If you have a popular blog (50,000 page views per month), Adversal provides a quality service which is considered by users as a great alternative to AdSense. Minimum payout is $20 via PayPal, ACH, Wire or Check, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you have passed the minimum page view barrier to sign up. Adversal offers a 100% fill rate to publishers as well as multiple ad-formats (banner, pop-under etc) to choose from.
