Advertising Network Reviews for Publishers |
| Canep Media | TheNewsRoom | AdBrite |
| AdJungle | Kumomo | Clicksor |
| CPX Interactive | AdToll | Blue Advertise |
| Gunggo | Xapads | BannerConnect |
| Chitika |
Before you begin... |
If you a website owner, you probably have commercial ads at your website, already. Or you have perhaps arrived here looking for nice advertising networks to work with. So we have several reviews. In the meantime, if you are looking for general information on online advertising, you are advised to read this article titled "Publisher’s Guide for Placing Ads." If you are new in hosting online ads, there are a few things you should be careful with. First, if you are located overseas, then you should check what type of payment option is available. Living overseas and accepting foreign checks mean that you have to pay $40 to $50 to cash in each check. Another thing you want to be careful with is whether or not the ad company allows you to use ad codes from other networks. There is no guarantee that there is always an advertiser willing to place ads at your website. While there isn't, you should use Default (in-house) ads, ad codes from Google, Amazon or whatever you can find. Finally, you should control ad codes with Server Side Includes. By using Sever Side Includes, you can instantly switch from one ad network to another. For more information on Server Side Includes, you are adverised to read this article. Furthermore, we have a video tutorial for CSS editing and Server Side Includes. Sorry, it's for members only. And there's one more important remark for us to make. Just for you to know is that you shouldn't believe everything you read here or in other websites that review advertising network programs. No advertising network is perfect. Whatever you use, you will always find some negative aspects. So if you are interested in a particular advertising network, sign up and face the reality. The main goal of a review site is to make affilate money. They never point out negative aspects of advertising networks because, logically speaking, they DO want you to sign up. Well, we never shut up. In the following, we will show you a lot of skeleton in the closet that we aren't really supposed to talk about. |
Review date: August 20, 2007
Although Canep Media doesn't accept publisher applications automatically, they say that they don't have a minimal number of daily visitors for acceptance. But you should probably have a daily average close to 1,000. And they don't make a decision overnight. We probably waited for one month or so. And our application was finally accepted. Canep Media's strengths are browser-based good ad management program and client support. Their client support is satisfactory because they are committed to answering your questions politely, promptly and thoroughly. Another stength of Canep Media is legitimacy. As I mentioned earlier, not all publishers are accepted into the publisher program. Even after accepted, publisher's websites are under constant review. Furthermore, whenever you register a "site," it won't be effective until Canep Media's support representative reads the description of the site and makes sure that the website exists. In other words, those publishers using Canep Media's ad network are likely to be legitimate. Moreover, there is a nice side of Canep Media's stance that you may not notice until you use another advertising network. That's freedom. Most online advertising companies will tell you where to place banners like within 500 pixels from the top of each webpage, how many banners you can use within a page, or how much traffic you have to generate. Once you are admitted into Canep Media's publisher program, you will be pretty much left alone. Many publisher programs have a language restriction. If you have some webpages that are written in a language other than English, you may want to ask Canep Media if you can use their ad codes on those pages. We have hundreds of webpages, for example, written in Japanese. And, surprisingly, they said we could use their ad codes on those pages. As long as all preference channels are wide open, Canep Media will find advertisers for you quickly. That's a good thing. A bad side is that the CPM can be quite low. If your daily number of visitors is around 1,000, they will only give you $0.08. So if you make 2,000 impressions a day, you will only make 16 cents a day. Can you make a living with $0.16 a day? Therefore, it is not worth hosting ads through Canep Media unless you have tens of thousands of visitors a day. And one major problem that we have detected in using Canep Media's ad codes is that ads don't always show up. If your website is set to browser's home page, sometimes, ads may not show up when you launch a web browser. Even when you surf your website, you may run across some pages where ads don't show up. If ads aren't displayed, then you won't get paid when in fact you are allocating space to ads.
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Review date: August 20, 2007
Internet users love free videos. That's why YouTube is such a hip. And you can host free videos at your website and even make money. That sounds like a good deal. There are thousands of videos, stories and articles to choose from. A problem with this ad network is that they don't use video windows that will fit conventional ad sizes like Leaderboard and Wide skyscraper. Most of them are vertically very long. They say their publisher program is still in beta. If you try to check your earnings, it says "myRevenue information is being updated and will be back soon!" (See the screenshot below to the left.) That's what's been shown for several days. We first learned about thenewsroom because Canep Media was displaying ads they acquired from thenewsroom's group company Voxant. As you see the screenshot in the middle, their single ad occupied almost the whole page. The problem was identified only with Opera 9.10. We reported the problem to both parties. Eventually, guys from thenewsroom were mocking us. Did we try to put their content in a 728x90 space? No, we did not. Our agreement with Canep Media is such that we display ads at a 728x90 space. But their ad occupied 728x550 pixels of space. In a sense, we were ripped off.
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Review date: August 20, 2007
AdBrite gives you a variety of ways in which you can earn money at your website. On top of convertional graphic banners or Flash animations + text-based ads, they have Interstitial Ads and Inline Ads. If you enable the interstitial ad, a webpage at your website can all of a sudden switch to a sponsored webpage. (See the sceenshot below to the left.) If you enable inline ads, as many as 8 words will be double-underlined on each webpage. And if you place a cursor over one of them, small window pops up with a commercial ad. Although they aren't around over weekends, AdBrite's support team is committed to helping their clients promptly. In order to request assistance, you will just need to fill out a contact form. And they will get back to you within 24 hours or by the end of the next business day. AdBrite could be your great ad partner. But they have several serious problems. Take a look at the second screenshot at the bottom, for example. Words that are doubled-underlined are "video," "august," "available," "effects," "order," "click," "link" and "entering." The most disturbing feature of their inline ads is that they will change cases. And who wants to have additional information on "effects' and "entering"? Unfortunately, AdBrite won't let you use your own customized list of words where inline ads will kick in. The worst part of AdBrite is its relationship with illegitimate groups like DriveCleaner.com and PCTURBOPRO. If you have interstitial ads or even banners enabled, your browser can be taken over by DriveCleaner's pop window and webpage. If you remove AdBrite's ad codes, those pop windows still spring up, replacing existing banners with theirs. That's quite disturbing, don't you think? We certainly have no idea whether AdBrite is willingly associated with DriveCleaner or actually a victim of server infiltration. But that shouldn't really matter to you if your visitors stop coming to your website because of DriveCleaner's or PCTURBOPRO's pop windows. And you can be even labeled as an accomplice, and visitors may never come back. The following is a comment we received from AdBrite concerning spam ads.
Furthermore, they have a browser compatibility problem. Suppose that you have a code from AdBrite, Ad Network A and Ad Network B. Let's also suppose that you use Ad Network A as AdBrite's backup and Ad Network B as Ad Network A's backup. When you install AdBrite's ad code and there is no advertiser around, AdBrite's system is such that Ad Network A's ads may be skipped and Ad Network B's ads may be displayed, depending on the web browser you use. We tested 5 web browsers for Mac and found that Firefox and OmniPage have trouble in this regard. The video below documents this issue. Since there is no advertiser, ads from Canep Media are supposed to show up. But they are skipped, depending on the browser, and Amazon ads are displayed, instead.
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Review date: August 20, 2007
Adjungle accepts an application from any publisher, which is nice. Other than that, Adjungle is the worst at every level. Their website doesn't really explain how to use their system. So Adjungle cannot be recommended to first-time publishers. When we used Adjungle, only half the impressions were counted possibly because of our dual add-ons that point to a mutual subdomain folder. Not only that their website doesn't explain how the system works but also they never reply to questions. They will probably answer your questions once or twice at the beginning, though. So we eventually abandoned Adjungle. Adjungle won't let you use ad codes from another network. So when there is no advertiser, you will end up displaying their in-house ads for free or with low CPMs.
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Review date: August 21, 2007
Kumomo is a relatively new website where website publishers can sell any type of ad space. It's sort of classified ads on newspaper. There is no banner format like Leaderboard or Wide Skyscraper. Basically, you will just have to decide what to sell and then set a monthly fee. Kumomo's ad manager for publishers is very simple and easy to use in a sense. First, you need to register an account. In this process, you will create a profile, describing your website, providing the URL, monthly number of unique visitors, site language and so forth. The next step is to create an Ad. Again, there is no ad format. So you decide on the size by providing horizontal and vertical number of pixels. You will then get to decide on the monthly rent for your space. Unlike other advertising networks, publishers are required to spend at least 1% of ad revenue to a charity. Acording to its website, they are raising money to build school in Cambodia. By the way, Kumomo has no power in enforcing a contract between a buyer and a seller. So when the publisher refuses to fulfill a contract in placing ads after receiving money through PayPal, the best that the space buyer could do is to write a negative review at seller's page.
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Review date: August 23, 2007
Similar to AdBrite, Clicksor supports various ad types with which publishers can turn traffic into a profit. They have conventional banners that are available in 10 different sizes. They also have inline text ads and sponsored page ads. Although Clicksor accepts an application from any publisher online, that doesn't mean that all registered publishers can actually get to use Clicksor's ad system. Once accepted, a publisher needs to create a new 'site,' providing the URL and giving a brief description of the website. And every 'site' that a publisher creates must be approved by Clicksor. And there is another hurdle. After being accepted into the publisher program, you will actually start in a trial status. And only after sufficient information is collected concerning your website and its traffic, you will get the 'approved' status. As far as Clicksor's inline text ads are concerned, words will be single-underlined. Just like AdBrite's inline text ads, this feature can appear on such simple words as 'small,' 'guys,' 'forward' and so forth. I have seen many words underlined on each webpage, which may not make a good impression to your visitors. Another disturbing feature is pop-under ads or sponsored pages. You can actually control the frequency of pop-under appearance like every 2 hours, 8 hours, once per month and so forth. When a pop-under ad turns on at your website, it can open at a full-screen size even after you choose not to let it open, which might give your visitors an impression that it's a spam pop-up window. Of course, you can disable this feature entirely, though. One disappointing feature of Clicksor's ad management system is ad code generation. Once you generate an ad code, you are finished. And ad code settings cannot be stored. So even if you want to make small changes to your banner appearance, you have to generate a code from a scratch. Some publishers may find Clicksor's publisher program difficult to use. For example, even if you turn off inline text ads, they may continue to appear at your website. In this case, you can actually modify your code for yourself by changing true to false on "clicksor_enable_text_link." And site visitors using Mac OS may find a phrase "Read more" at every page of your website. We tested five web browsers that available for Mac OS, and they all display "Read more" at the top of every webpage plus a WordPress blog due to Clicksor's ad codes. There are also a couple of rules that are hard to follow. One rule is such that the publisher is allowed to display only one ad from Clicksor on each page. Another rule states that an ad must not appear below 500 pixels from the top of the page. Concerning this one-banner-per-page rule, we have received the following comment from Clicksor support person.
Furthermore, they have also acknoledged that there is an ad display issue with web browsers for Mac OS as the she wrote:
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Review date: September 3, 2007
1,000 unique visitors a day, right? Not a problem... That's what we thought. So we applied. Several hours later, we received a message from CPX Interactive, which is shown below.
Yes. We were rejected. We don't know how they are calculating the number of daily unique visitors. We are at least aware that it didn't take them 24 hours to send us the rejection message. We replied to the message above saying that we have a couple of add-on domains including www.mhvt.net pointing to a mutual subdomain folder and also that we have several subdomain websites. But we never heard from them again. It would be silly if they were refering to figures shown in our AdBrite pages. Before signing up, you may probably want to read their Terms and Conditions. They state a lot of minute rules under Section 5. Minimum Traffic.
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Review date: September 4, 2007
AdToll is run by Purplex Pty Ltd, which is located in Perth, Western Australia. AdToll offers an interesting advertising network, which is somewhat similar to Komomo. That is, you won't place banner ads based on CPM. What you sell is a banner lot for a sponsored ad. There are 10 banner sizes to choose from. And you set the weekly rental price for each space. It will be you who decide at what fixed price you want to sell your banner space. After signing up, you will be assigned an Account Manager, who oversees your websites and use of your account regularly. So, although AdToll accepts all publisher applications, you are under regular surveillance. Using AdToll's advertising control manager is easy. First, click on the tab that says My account after logging into your account. (See the 1st screenshot.) Then click on 'Add a New Site.' (See the 2nd screenshot.) Site is the framework where a group of banners with common characteristics will be laid out. After setting up a site, you need to create an ad group for each sponsored banner to be on sale. So click on 'Add Ad Group' button. AdToll's publisher program, again, allows you to sell banner space on your website. They will take 25% of your revenue generated from banner space sales. A sponsored ad generates a fixed amount of revenue each week. So there is no CPM. And there is no impression-based in-house ads they will run while there is no buyer for your space. Instead, AdToll has what they call Run of Newwork (RON) ads. They are cost-per-click (CPC) ads. So you will get paid only when a visitor clicks on a banner. It is possible to run an ad from another network while there is no buyer for your sponsored banner space. If you create a new Ad Group, there is a feature labeled 'Default Ads URL' at the bottom of the page. (See the 4th screenshot.) That's where you need to specify the location of the file containing an ad code from another network. Just for you to know, we have detected one problem in using AdToll's ad codes with WordPress blog. We inserted AdToll's ad code at header, sidebar and footer. When we inserted an ad code from AdToll each in WordPress' footer.php and sidebar.php, the ad which is supposed to appear at the bottom actually appeared at the sidebar. (See the 8th screenshot.)
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Review date: September 4, 2007
Blue Advertise is a new advertising network just for publishers. It was launched at the end of August, 2007. This advertising network is run by a company or a group of individuals located in Slovakia (Central Europe). Its introduction at the gate page is all written in English. But once you log in, you will be shocked because some pages are all written in Slovak. In fact, after registering an account, I logged in. And I landed at their Terms page, which is all written in Slovak. They seem to have removed this page. But if you go to your account page, which they call Workbench, again, it's all written in Slovak. So who is actually running this advertising network? If you browse the entire website, you won't see a company name, address, phone number or any corporate or personal information. In fact, we asked by e-mail twice where we could find their office information. But we have been ignored. Furthermore, before signing up, we asked several questions like what is their share of revenue, minimum CPMs, payment options and so forth. But we haven't received a reply. Naturally, we have become very suspicious about this advertising network. They say they support websites with adult content. They also say that websites built at free web services like Yahoo's GeoCities and Google's blogspot will be accepted. We were curious as to what kind of ads they are going to run. So we tested an ad code for 728 x 90 pixels from Blue Advertise. And what we saw appeared to be a legitimate ad. (See the 5th screenshot.) By the way, once you log in your account page, you can see Blue Advertise's expected CPMs. (See the 6th screenshot.) According to this CPM chart, all banner sizes but 180 x 150 Small Rectangle generate at least US$0.12. The highest CPM is US$0.90 for 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper. Just for you to know that Blue Advertise only offers CPM-based banners for publishers. They have no cost-per-click (CPC) banners or sponsored pop-up windows. It sounds like there are many negative aspects about Blue Advertise. Actually, there is one advantage in using Blue Advertise's ad codes. Many advertising networks don't guarantee that there is an advertiser that stands ready for your banner. No matter what the promised CPM is, you may not earn a penny, depending on the geographical location of a visitor to your website. Blue Advertise's system is simple in such a way that as long as you place an ad code, an ad will run on your website. And you are promised at least US$0.04 per 1,000 impressions.
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Review date: May 5, 2008
Canadian advertising network company Gunggo (Gungoo.Co, Ltd.) specializes itself in delivering entertainment, gambling and adult-oriented ads. Because of their specialty, Gunggo can offer higher rates than other advertising network companies do. In the meantime, Gunggo is somewhat covered by mysteries. We also have to say that they are equipped with poor technologies and poor human support. So how did we find this advertising company in the first place? Actually, we didn't. It's the other way around. They contacted us by e-mail out of the blue in February. (See Screenshot GG-01.) We wanted to know what the ad rates are and also what payment options they have. In fact, I ended up asking the same set of questions twice. (See Screenshot GG-02-3.) And the same guy failed to answer these questions twice. We aren't playing baseball, and getting yourself two strikes can ban you from contacting us again at MacHouse. So we decided to ignore this advertising company. Nonetheless, we decided to give Gunggo another try because we decided to abandon an existing ad network company in late April because of a series of misconduct by them. Anyway, we found out by reading their terms of conditions that they support PayPal. We are located in Japan and don't want foreign-currency-denominated checks, or our advising bank would charge more than $40 for every check that we bring in. So their support for PayPal is good news for us. So how does their ad system work for publishers? Honestly, we aren't so sure. Anyway, if you have an account, nothing will happen until you login and set up your account profile, right? You can login in your account at any page that shows Client Login to the right. (See Screenshot GG-04.) But if you do... You will be forwarded to a website whose domain is zedo.com. What is zedo.com? Anyway, after loginning in, you only have two options. Click on either Reports or Users. (See Screenshot GG-05.) If see your account information, there is no payment option that you can choose . So that's a potential danger of receving checks regardless of your will, which happened to us with Canep Media. If you go to the Report page, you can generate a summary of performance at your website. (See Screenshot GG-06.) It shows the numbers of impressions being displayed and clicks. Umm... Isn't something missing in this report? It doesn't show how much you have earned. So what rates do they offer? We asked, and Vice President of Business Development answered the following.
As for eCPM banners our average rate is $0.15/CPM. eCPM is estimated CPM rate as we will provide you with a CPM, CPC, and CPL ads. If the results of your traffic are good, you will see a much higher CPM of $0.15. Good quality publishers in our program have an average CPM of around $0.70.
A starting rate of $0.15 is not bad at all. But the problem is that you can't confirm it. The summary report doesn't show how much you have earned. As I mentioned earlier, there are two tabs to click on after logging in. Have you noticed something important missing? How do you generate ad codes? Again, we aren't 100% sure. We asked, and the vice president asked us in return what ad sizes we intended to display. Then we received our ad codes by e-mail. (See Screenshot GG-07.) So we asked
Do we need to contact you whenever we need a different ad size?
And the reply from Mr. vice president was
Yes whenever you need an ad size you may contact me as I will definitely provide it to you if possible.
A good thing that we found out is that he answers questions unlike the first guy, right? Anyway, using their ad codes, we occasionally saw ads by online gamble websites including 888.com and others at our website. Some of these advertisers are directly affiliated with criminal organizations that use iframe injection to insert ill codes to webpages (that they do not own) for involuntary redirection to their own gambling websites. One of them is 888.com. Another one is freelotto.com. And we won't mentione their names unless we are 100% sure. So be careful with the advertisers for which you are displaying ads. We understood that, depending on the geographic location and amount of traffic, Gunggo might not be able to serve ads at any time. Accordingly, we saw impressions that said gunggo. (See Screenshot GG-08.) So we asked if they are displaying this gunggo ad without paying by saying
Do we get paid by displaying your Gunggo.com ad?
And that's when the vice president guy stopped answering a question. We asked them not to display their own ad if they intend not to pay for it. That's when he started playing dumb by saying
to help you resolve this issue for you we can display a default ad for you. All I need is your default tag.
It's not the matter of whether or not we provide them with a default ad tag or whatever. If you intend not to pay for it, then don't bring it. Just display nothing when there are no advertisers. Is that so hard to understand?. Inevitably, we removed all their ad codes.
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Review date: July 1, 2008
We know a dozen American advertisng network companies. Xapads is one of a few exceptions that we know of. Their main office is located in New Delhi, India, according to the contact page found at their website. There is something totally different about this advertisng network company. They don't seem to have many advertisers of their own. In fact, they mainly display banners from other networks to make sure that your impressions will be almost 100% filled. That'll be great, right? Inevitably, an average rate is not so good. According to Xapads, an average CPM rate is US$0.07 per mille. By the way, their impressions may come from AdBrite, Axill, Harren Media Network and others. It's very easy to use Xapads' ad system. First, you need to log in your account. As shown in Screenshot XA-01, you will see a clickable link that says 'Apply for Banner ads.' Now, you need to describe your website. (Screenshot XA-02.) If approved, you will receive an e-mail message. Then you will find a clickable link that says 'Get Code' in your account. If you click on it, you will arrive at a page with several ad codes, which you can paste on your webpages. (See Screenshot XA-03.) There are a few major problems with this advertising network company. One problem seems to involve AdBrite only. When Xapads attempts to load a banner from AdBrite, there is a good chance that Xapads fails to deliver it. When Xapads fails, a white blank banner will appear. In fact, Screenshot XA-04 shows a blank impression at the top. I had to refresh the page 4 to 5 times to finally get a banner loaded. (See Screenshot XA-05.) A more serious problem that we have observed is the way they count the number of impressions. We used their ad codes for about 2 full days at the end of June. According to Xapds, they say they delivered some 1,400 impressions. (See Screenshot XA-06.) That's way too modest. How modest? We would say that's about one tenth of the actual number. All right. We won't take a wild guess. We have 3,000 to 3,800 unique visitors daily. You may or may not know that we use two domains (MHVT.NET and MHOUSE-J.COM) to deliver the exactly same content at any time. And we have several subdomains to host different content. For example, this SEO/Web Hosting content is hosted under the subdomain of seo. Screenshot XA-07 shows that the number of page views on the last day of June was 1,596. This is just for SEO.MHVT.NET. The number should be a lot lower for SEO.MHOUSE-J.COM. Furthermore, according to Screenshot XA-08, the number of page views at MACHOUSE.MHVT.NET was 1,983. I'll be modest. So let's say that there were only 2 banners on each page. 1,553 + 1,596 + 1,805 + 1,983 gives 6,937 page views. And let's multiply that number by 2. There were at least 13,874 impressions. Not to mention, this final number doesn't include traffic at SEO.M-HOUSE-J.COM, MACHOUSE.MHOUSE-J.COM, WWW.MHVT.NET and more. I guess one tenth is too modest. So what does Xapads have to say about this large discrepancy? Their represenative wrote:
We counts 100% of the impressions on which ads are displayed.. There are chances that u had 1000 page views but only 750 ad views are counted, as only 750 times the ads were loaded completely. (See Screenshot XA-09)
Well, their explanations don't account for such a large discrepancy, do they? So how do they calculate the number of impressions? It seems that they use Quantcast's system to count them. If you visit a website where Xapads' ad codes are placed, a web browser will access 'pixel.quantserve.com,' which belongs to Quantcast. In conclusion, an average CPM rate of $0.07 per mille would not be totally bad as long as they filled all impressions. However, one out of 4 to 5 impressions fails to appear. More importantly, Xapads fails to explain a large discrepancy as far as the number of displayed impressions is concerned. One tenth is too modest. Our guess is that Xapads only counts one out of 14 to 15 impressions at least at our websites.
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Review date: July 9, 2008
BannerConnect is an advertsing network company based in Europe. Its office location is not listed on its website. There are 2 numbers each for phone and fax listed at its contact page. And the international telephone identity code (31) suggests that they are from the Netherlands. According to BannerConnect, the CPM depends on the origin of traffic as well as other aspects like the industry you engage in or the main subject of the website. Nonetheless, they say an average CPM for U.S. traffic that they pay can be as high as $0.24. For European countries, they say they pay an average of $0.22. These CPM rates are quite high. Who else pays that much with 100% fill rate for relatively low traffic websites like ours? Right... They say the ad fill rate is 100%. So they can contactly deliver banners. Whoa... That's too good to be true, right? Let's talk about payments, at first. According to BannerConnect, they adopt Net 60 payments. That means you will receive your earning 60 days after it's reported at the end of each month. The minimum payment threshold is US$0.01, according to its Publishers Handbook 1.1. (See Screenshot BC-01.) But its publisher support page says otherwise. It says the minimum payment is US$30. (See Screenshot BC-02.) So which is true? We asked, and a BannerConnect support representative said they pay every penny after 60 days. As for payment options, they support wire transfers and PayPal. A minimum amount to have a payment wired is US$100. They say they will not send a payment by check because of security issues. That's kind of interestiing because there are some advertising companies like AdBrite that refuse to support PayPal. And all other companies except BannerConnect send payments by check. If you log in your account, you will see four tabs. The first one appearing to the left is Reporting. Under this tab, there are three charts showing your website's performance. (See Screenshot BC-03.) That's quite cool. There is something that doesn't add up for us by looking at these charts. We have about 3,000 unique visitors daily. Sometimes, the number nears 4,000. Depending on the page, there are 2 to 3 banners from BannerConnect. Let's suppose that each visitor has a page view number of 1.5. And there are 2 banners at each page. So if there are 3,000 visitors daily, the total number of impressions on any given day should be 9,000. But the chart shown at the top right says the highest number of impressions ever delivered is around 4,000. If they really have a fill rate of 100%, then missing 5,000 impressions make a big discrepancy. How does that happen? If you are located in the U.S. or western Europe, you may not see BannerConnect's own banner appearing on your website. We are located in Japan, and we've seen their banners. Sometimes, there's one banner or two banners on one webpage. Occasionally, all 3 banners (1 each for 728 x 90, 160 x 600, 468 x 60) are replaced by those of BannerConnect. (See Screenshot BC-04-5.) So that's actually the way they achieve 100% fill rate. And they won't let you use default ads for occasions when there are no advertisers. If there are no advertisers, BannerConnect wants to run their own banners. If fact, we asked them about using default ads. And they said our number 1 traffic origin is Japan. So they won't let us use default ads. (See Screenshot BC-06.) Umm... Just because we are located in Japan, that doesn't mean a majority of our visitors come from Japan. Anyway, generating ad codes is quite simple for BannerConnect. After logging in, click on the Tags tab. Then you will see two options. Banners or Pops. (See Screenshot See Screenshot BC-07-8.) There are 4 different popup ads. BannerConnect won't let you store the ad codes you have generated. But that's not terribly bad. By the way, BannerConnect doesn't support inline text ads. One more thing... If you use BannerConnect's ad system, you may occasionally enter a page loading problem. (See Screenshot 09.)
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Review date: March 1, 2009
Chitika (300 Nickerson Road, Marlborough, MA 01752, USA) is a relatively new advertising network. The company itself seems to have come into existence in 2003. Its core ad type Chitika Premium was launch only in May, 2008 and Chitika Graphic ads in March, 2008. There were five or six different ads types (Chitika Premium, eMiniMalls, MPU, Graphic Ads, Linx, WhitespaceAds) till several months ago. As of March, 2009, eMiniMalls and MPU appear to have been discontinued. Current active ad types are Chitika Premium, Linx, WhitespaceAds. Existing Graphic Ads are still effective, but new ad codes may not be generated. Again, its core ad type is Chitika Premium. It's a CPC-based ad type. Screeenshot CH-01 shows an example of a Chitika Premium ad for Leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels). If I type 'adobe' and click on the find button, for example, three sponsored ads will appear. (Screeenshot CH-02.) That's presumably how Chitika Premium works. Because we are not located in North America, we don't get to see the actual impressions of Chitika Premium at our websites. In other words, Chitika Premium works only for those visitors from Canada or the United States. Fortunately, Chitika Premium allows you to specify a default ad for those visitors outside North America. (Screeenshot CH-03.) Note that you have to specify a URL or the location of the text file (.txt, .html...) containing an ad code as opposed to an alternate ad code itself in order to display a different ad. Linx is similar to Chitika Premium to the extent that it applies to traffic from North America only and also that it's CPC-based. Linx is an inline text ad where keywords will be double-underlined. If a website visitor places the Mouse pointer over underlined keywords, a small ad window will pop up. (Screeenshot CH-04.) The ad publisher has to come up with a list of key words. Shown in CH-05, I have applied the following three keywords to my ad code: adobe apple mac. So if we used this ad code, these keywords appearing at our website would be underlined. Chitika Premium is a little bit difficult to use for ad publishers both inside and outside North America. Publishers who are located outside North America cannot virtually witness the effectiveness of Chitika Premium themselves. For them, the only way of finding out whether Chitika Premium is working is to see the 13-day report where the number of clicks for each day is shown. (Screeenshot CH-06.) For those publishers who are located inside North America, Chitika Premium a bit hard to use because they won't know what's shown for visitors from outside North America. Screeenshot CH-07 is a screenshot of our website that was taken just before 2008 Christmas. Chitika's Graphic Ad was supposed to appear. But their server was down, according to the ad company. Instead, an empty Chitika Premium ad appeared. We wouldn't have known that their system malfunctioned if we were located in North America, right? Chitika's payment terms are net 30 days. That means your account will be closed at the end of the month. Then Chitika will check to see if there were fraudulent clicks. Finally, a payment will be made at the end of the following month. For example, Screeenshot CH-08 shows a PayPal e-mail receipt of payment made by Chitika on February 28, 2009. This payment accounts for our ad earnings (clicks and impressions) throughout January, 2009. We regret to say, but Chitika's customer support is horrible. We have tried to contact them three times in the past. If you hear from them in 4 or 5 days, consider youself lucky. Once it took them two weeks to reply. Their excuse was "this question was assigned to a member of our support team that was away for the Christmas and New Years holidays, and was never re-assigned." (See Screenshot 09.) We attempted to contact them only because shit (ad server down) happened. In other two occasions, the excuse was the same. "this question was re-assigned to a member of our support team that is no longer with the company."
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