Whenever someone talks about monetization, invariably, the first
thing that pops up into the mind is Google AdSense. And while there’s
nothing particularly wrong with that—it is, after all, the world’s
largest ad network, but to sit on an assumption that AdSense can’t be
outdone by anyone isn’t wise.
The ad tech industry is highly disruptive and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Google has competitors who give them a good run for their money.
It may take a lot of hit and trial to figure out which ad network, or even combination of ad networks, generate the highest revenue for you, but when you finally do figure it out—it would have been well worth the effort.
Here are a few networks that you must check out in 2015.
Adsterra is one of the fastest growing premium ad networks and currently serves over 10 billion geo-targeted ad impression each month. They support publishers from all verticals and guarantee 100% monetization of their ad inventory.
Adsterra offers a vast variety of effective ad formats in all popular sizes for both web and mobile including: Pushup, interstitial, display banners, popunders, sliders, and direct links. Each campaign is tested hourly through an automated verification software designed by GeoEdge, ensuring the highest possible ad quality and security.
Publishers also enjoy on-time payments made bi-weekly via major payment systems, as well as a personal account manager and real-time statistics.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: 300,000
Revcontent is one of the biggest content recommendation platforms on the internet, currently serving 100 billion content recommendations a month across the globe with a growth rate of 900% last year.
Revcontent is notoriously difficult to join as it rejects almost 98% of websites that apply – focusing more on the quality of its publisher network rather than the quantity. This strategy has helped Revcontent generate higher revenues, better engagement rates, and loyal audiences for their partners.
As part of product improvement efforts, they’ve just launched Revcontent v2, which features an intuitive user interface that enables transparent reporting and easier customization of widgets.
Model: CPC Minimum traffic: N/A
AdBlade is a premium, brand-safe ad network with a focus on quality over quantity. Fox News, Hearst Corporation, Yahoo!, and ABC are among the 1,000 or so publishers that comprise the network. AdBlade supports standard IAB units, as well as proprietary NewsBullets® units that claim to deliver up to 3x better performance.
Model: CPM, CPC Minimum traffic: 500,000 monthly impressions
Revenue Hits uses contextual and geo-targeted ad serving technology to deliver better revenue for their publishers across different types of properties such as websites, mobile sites, add-ons, widgets, toolbar, and many more.
It serves over two billion ad impressions each day with a promise of 100% fill rate across all geographic regions.
Other than display ads, Revenue Hits also lets publishers monetize their website using text ads, pop ups, apps, widgets, XML feeds, and other custom formats.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV, Auction Minimum traffic: None
Undertone specializes in providing several high-impact ad formats in addition to standard IAB—including IAB rising stars, several video formats, and its own range of flagship display formats designed for higher user engagement.
This coupled with the fact that many of Undertone’s proprietary ad units use your ad inventory in non-traditional ways, ensuring there’s no cannibalization of existing ad products, means that Undertone can offer CPMs 100%-1500% higher than traditional display ads.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV Minimum traffic: 500,000
Though your mileage may vary, Bidvertiser is an ad network with an interesting monetization model: In addition to earning money for each ad that is clicked, the publisher also earns additional revenue when the click leads to a conversion (i.e. sale) for the advertiser.
BidVertiser supports multiple ad formats including banners, skyscrapers, rectangles, and mobile. You can use the provided point-and-click tool to customize the layout of these units to match your website’s look.
A bidding system ensures that publishers always get the highest possible revenue from each unit. Using the reporting interface, you can easily monitor your ads performance, clicks, click-through rate, and the total amount you’ve earned.
Model: CPM, CPC Minimum traffic: None
Vibrant Media is another ad network that offers specialty ad formats such as in-text, in-image, lightbox, storyboard, mosaic, and brand canvas in addition to the standard IAB display ad units.
Depending on your needs, you can choose to use Vibrant Media as your primary display ad network or you can employ their native ad solutions to increase revenue without changing your existing ad configuration
Ads are responsive so they can be delivered across multiple platforms seamlessly.
Model: CPM, CPC Minimum traffic: None
Clicksor serves over 900 million ad impressions on over 100,000 specialized websites that comprise its publisher network. In addition to regular banner ads, Clicksor also offers in-text ads, rich media, interstitials, and pop-unders as alternative ad formats.
Under the hood, Clicksor scans the text on your website and serves ads using the latest contextual technology, resulting in a higher click-through rate.
Installation is a breeze with Clicksor’s plugin for Blogger, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla that you just need to download and activate to get going.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV, CPI Minimum traffic: None
Advertising.com, is the technology, data and insights arm of AOL Advertising. It has relationships with 70+ of comScore’s Top 100 ad-supported sites, with a publisher network spanning 30+ content verticals and monetizes nearly 2 billion ad impressions per day on average.
If you’re looking for a specific set of advertisers, Advertising.com offers ad blocks by advertiser, industry, media, and category to ensure the best fit for your site.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: 300,000 monthly impressions
Creafi Online Media serves over 300 million ad impressions daily and hinges its USP on advanced audience targeting methodologies such as behavioral targeting, retargeting, and semantic targeting.
When advertisers can customize who sees their ads based on behavior and context using these tools, ad performance shoots up and it’s a win-win for both them and the publishers. To publishers, Creafi offers multiple ad formats and revenue streams and a greater degree of control over ad inventory.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV Minimum traffic: 1,000,000
Epom Market is a cross-platform ad network associated with leading advertisers and publishers in over 40 countries across 15 verticals. The network serves 13 billion ad impressions reaches an audience of 320 million unique monthly visitors per month.
It offers category-targeted, mobile, and local ads to ensure better
user targeting, which lead to higher eCPM rates. In addition to standard
banner ads, Epom also supports footer, in-text, and mobile-specific ad
units.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, Auction Minimum traffic: 500,000
Media Nexus is an ad network that works with fortune 500 and global brands, with some being exclusive to their network.
This means that ads served by the network are usually of high quality and add to a user’s experience (instead of taking away from it).
The network serves six distinct verticals and offers publishers monthly payments, a dedicated account manager, high eCPMs, and 100% fill rates.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV Minimum traffic: 5,000,000
Haxhax is a premium, brand-safe private marketplace with over 100 handpicked premium publishers serving video, rich media, mobile and traditional display. Haxhax provides comprehensive reporting, multi-screen ad servicing, and an auto-invoicing system to get your payouts on time.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV, Auction Minimum traffic: 500,000
Traditional banner ads have one big problem that results in big revenue losses: A lot of users either consciously or subconsciously ignore them because ads are usually viewed as an intrusion.
Infolinks is an ad network that gets around this problem by offering an innovative set of ad formats called InFold (overlay ads), InText (text links ads), InTag (tag cloud ads), and InFrame (banner ads in margins and frames) that result in better SEO, less intrusion, increased relevance, and better space utilization.
Model: CPC Minimum traffic: 500,000
Media.net serves ads from the Yahoo! Bing contextual ad network, which comprises of a large pool of national and local advertisers, ensuring a 100% fill rate across all verticals and ad formats.
Some of Media.net’s publishers include Forbes, Elle, Reuters, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and more. The network supports standard IAB sizes and has access to high quality ads from all major DSPs.
In addition to display units, Media.net also supports desktop interstitial, in-content native, and mobile docked ads.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: None
PropellerAds support banner ads in all standard sizes such as 728×90, 300×250, 160×600, 120×600, and more apart from onclick and in-banner video ad formats. If the ads are positioned strategically, you can expect CPMs as much as 1-2$ for US and UK inventory.
They have 3,000 active campaigns worldwide and perform manual checks to remove all unsafe and suspicious advertisers—ensuring high ad quality.
Publishers get the benefit of a 100% monetized inventory, in-time payouts, a personal account manager, and detailed real-time reporting.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: None
An ad network that specifically caters to bloggers, BlogAds represents thousands of premier blogs such as PerezHilton, DailyKos, Wonkette and Cute Overload. Set up is easy and you can manage multiple sites from one account.
BlogAds offers a high level of control over your advertising by letting you determine which ad sizes to offer, set your own prices, customize the appearance of ads, and accept or reject ads.
There are no monthly fees; instead, BlogAds keep 14% of sales made to your readers. Most common IAB ad sizes are supported. It’s worth a try if you’re a blogger who wants to try an alternative to AdSense.
Model: CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: None
PulsePoint is an ad network that processes 110 billion ad transactions each month across its platform. They’re big on data-driven ad optimization—crunching about 20TB of it every day.
Their proprietary contextual ensures better ad targeting and increase relevance, giving publishers the opportunity to monetize impressions buyers would normally overlook. There are no sign up fees or hidden costs.
Model: CPM Minimum traffic: None
Conversant runs campaigns for 5,000+ brands every month, increasing the chances of finding an ideal fit for all content verticals. A real-time publisher interface offers fully transparent campaign reporting along with activity and revenue data.
Their cross-platform advertising solutions ensure that publishers are able to maximize their revenue from mobile devices.
In addition to standard display, they offer ads in multiple other formats such as in-text rollovers, static, rich media, banners, over the page and more.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: None
AdCash is one of the foremost advertising networks and provides high-quality ads from leading brands and exclusive pricing models designed to effectively monetize their online content and increase revenue.
AdCash supports all industry standard as well as exclusive display formats such as site under, footer, interstitial, slide-in, background, and more. It has over 1,000 ad campaigns running on its platform—the big inventory means better ad targeting.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: None
A popular alternative to AdSense, Chitika has over 350,000 publishers on its network and serves over four billion ads per month, making it one of the largest ad networks in the world if you were to go by those metrics.
Its proprietary targeting and optimization technology uses programmatic buying to serve precisely the right ad, at the right time. The approval process for new publishers is usually pretty straightforward and takes little time.
Model: CPC Minimum traffic: None
The CPM rates of Tribal Fusion is amongst the highest in the industry and they offer reliable payments, dedicated account manager, real-time reporting, and free ad-serving technology.
You can control the content of ads by blocking ad categories (i.e. gambling, religious, political, alcohol, flashing, warning, etc.) or by specific advertiser domain names.
Based on content of the website, Tribal Fusion’s server finds the best advertiser-audience fit in real-time, benefitting both the advertiser and the publisher.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV Minimum traffic: 500,000
WWW Promoter offers publishers high fill rates, competitive CPMs, advanced targeting, and efficient ad serving using its proprietary ad serving technology.
They focus on building a network that comprises of trusted brands and advertisers, eliminating the possibility of low-quality ads being served. The inhouse ad platform has a reporting tool that helps publishers track their CPMs in real-time.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV Minimum traffic: 1,000,000
Let us know if we missed something in the comments below!
The ad tech industry is highly disruptive and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Google has competitors who give them a good run for their money.
It may take a lot of hit and trial to figure out which ad network, or even combination of ad networks, generate the highest revenue for you, but when you finally do figure it out—it would have been well worth the effort.
Here are a few networks that you must check out in 2015.
1. Adsterra Network
Adsterra is one of the fastest growing premium ad networks and currently serves over 10 billion geo-targeted ad impression each month. They support publishers from all verticals and guarantee 100% monetization of their ad inventory.
Adsterra offers a vast variety of effective ad formats in all popular sizes for both web and mobile including: Pushup, interstitial, display banners, popunders, sliders, and direct links. Each campaign is tested hourly through an automated verification software designed by GeoEdge, ensuring the highest possible ad quality and security.
Publishers also enjoy on-time payments made bi-weekly via major payment systems, as well as a personal account manager and real-time statistics.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: 300,000
2. Revcontent
Revcontent is one of the biggest content recommendation platforms on the internet, currently serving 100 billion content recommendations a month across the globe with a growth rate of 900% last year.
Revcontent is notoriously difficult to join as it rejects almost 98% of websites that apply – focusing more on the quality of its publisher network rather than the quantity. This strategy has helped Revcontent generate higher revenues, better engagement rates, and loyal audiences for their partners.
As part of product improvement efforts, they’ve just launched Revcontent v2, which features an intuitive user interface that enables transparent reporting and easier customization of widgets.
Model: CPC Minimum traffic: N/A
2. AdBlade
AdBlade is a premium, brand-safe ad network with a focus on quality over quantity. Fox News, Hearst Corporation, Yahoo!, and ABC are among the 1,000 or so publishers that comprise the network. AdBlade supports standard IAB units, as well as proprietary NewsBullets® units that claim to deliver up to 3x better performance.
Model: CPM, CPC Minimum traffic: 500,000 monthly impressions
3. Revenue Hits
Revenue Hits uses contextual and geo-targeted ad serving technology to deliver better revenue for their publishers across different types of properties such as websites, mobile sites, add-ons, widgets, toolbar, and many more.
It serves over two billion ad impressions each day with a promise of 100% fill rate across all geographic regions.
Other than display ads, Revenue Hits also lets publishers monetize their website using text ads, pop ups, apps, widgets, XML feeds, and other custom formats.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV, Auction Minimum traffic: None
4. Undertone
Undertone specializes in providing several high-impact ad formats in addition to standard IAB—including IAB rising stars, several video formats, and its own range of flagship display formats designed for higher user engagement.
This coupled with the fact that many of Undertone’s proprietary ad units use your ad inventory in non-traditional ways, ensuring there’s no cannibalization of existing ad products, means that Undertone can offer CPMs 100%-1500% higher than traditional display ads.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV Minimum traffic: 500,000
5. BidVertiser
Though your mileage may vary, Bidvertiser is an ad network with an interesting monetization model: In addition to earning money for each ad that is clicked, the publisher also earns additional revenue when the click leads to a conversion (i.e. sale) for the advertiser.
BidVertiser supports multiple ad formats including banners, skyscrapers, rectangles, and mobile. You can use the provided point-and-click tool to customize the layout of these units to match your website’s look.
A bidding system ensures that publishers always get the highest possible revenue from each unit. Using the reporting interface, you can easily monitor your ads performance, clicks, click-through rate, and the total amount you’ve earned.
Model: CPM, CPC Minimum traffic: None
6. Vibrant Media
Vibrant Media is another ad network that offers specialty ad formats such as in-text, in-image, lightbox, storyboard, mosaic, and brand canvas in addition to the standard IAB display ad units.
Depending on your needs, you can choose to use Vibrant Media as your primary display ad network or you can employ their native ad solutions to increase revenue without changing your existing ad configuration
Ads are responsive so they can be delivered across multiple platforms seamlessly.
Model: CPM, CPC Minimum traffic: None
7. Clicksor
Clicksor serves over 900 million ad impressions on over 100,000 specialized websites that comprise its publisher network. In addition to regular banner ads, Clicksor also offers in-text ads, rich media, interstitials, and pop-unders as alternative ad formats.
Under the hood, Clicksor scans the text on your website and serves ads using the latest contextual technology, resulting in a higher click-through rate.
Installation is a breeze with Clicksor’s plugin for Blogger, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla that you just need to download and activate to get going.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV, CPI Minimum traffic: None
8. Advertising.com
Advertising.com, is the technology, data and insights arm of AOL Advertising. It has relationships with 70+ of comScore’s Top 100 ad-supported sites, with a publisher network spanning 30+ content verticals and monetizes nearly 2 billion ad impressions per day on average.
If you’re looking for a specific set of advertisers, Advertising.com offers ad blocks by advertiser, industry, media, and category to ensure the best fit for your site.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: 300,000 monthly impressions
9. Creafi Online Media
Creafi Online Media serves over 300 million ad impressions daily and hinges its USP on advanced audience targeting methodologies such as behavioral targeting, retargeting, and semantic targeting.
When advertisers can customize who sees their ads based on behavior and context using these tools, ad performance shoots up and it’s a win-win for both them and the publishers. To publishers, Creafi offers multiple ad formats and revenue streams and a greater degree of control over ad inventory.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV Minimum traffic: 1,000,000
10. Epom Market
Epom Market is a cross-platform ad network associated with leading advertisers and publishers in over 40 countries across 15 verticals. The network serves 13 billion ad impressions reaches an audience of 320 million unique monthly visitors per month.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, Auction Minimum traffic: 500,000
11. Media Nexus
Media Nexus is an ad network that works with fortune 500 and global brands, with some being exclusive to their network.
This means that ads served by the network are usually of high quality and add to a user’s experience (instead of taking away from it).
The network serves six distinct verticals and offers publishers monthly payments, a dedicated account manager, high eCPMs, and 100% fill rates.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV Minimum traffic: 5,000,000
12. Haxhax
Haxhax is a premium, brand-safe private marketplace with over 100 handpicked premium publishers serving video, rich media, mobile and traditional display. Haxhax provides comprehensive reporting, multi-screen ad servicing, and an auto-invoicing system to get your payouts on time.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPV, Auction Minimum traffic: 500,000
13. Infolinks
Traditional banner ads have one big problem that results in big revenue losses: A lot of users either consciously or subconsciously ignore them because ads are usually viewed as an intrusion.
Infolinks is an ad network that gets around this problem by offering an innovative set of ad formats called InFold (overlay ads), InText (text links ads), InTag (tag cloud ads), and InFrame (banner ads in margins and frames) that result in better SEO, less intrusion, increased relevance, and better space utilization.
Model: CPC Minimum traffic: 500,000
14. Media.net
Media.net serves ads from the Yahoo! Bing contextual ad network, which comprises of a large pool of national and local advertisers, ensuring a 100% fill rate across all verticals and ad formats.
Some of Media.net’s publishers include Forbes, Elle, Reuters, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and more. The network supports standard IAB sizes and has access to high quality ads from all major DSPs.
In addition to display units, Media.net also supports desktop interstitial, in-content native, and mobile docked ads.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: None
15. PropellerAds
PropellerAds support banner ads in all standard sizes such as 728×90, 300×250, 160×600, 120×600, and more apart from onclick and in-banner video ad formats. If the ads are positioned strategically, you can expect CPMs as much as 1-2$ for US and UK inventory.
They have 3,000 active campaigns worldwide and perform manual checks to remove all unsafe and suspicious advertisers—ensuring high ad quality.
Publishers get the benefit of a 100% monetized inventory, in-time payouts, a personal account manager, and detailed real-time reporting.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: None
16. BlogAds
An ad network that specifically caters to bloggers, BlogAds represents thousands of premier blogs such as PerezHilton, DailyKos, Wonkette and Cute Overload. Set up is easy and you can manage multiple sites from one account.
BlogAds offers a high level of control over your advertising by letting you determine which ad sizes to offer, set your own prices, customize the appearance of ads, and accept or reject ads.
There are no monthly fees; instead, BlogAds keep 14% of sales made to your readers. Most common IAB ad sizes are supported. It’s worth a try if you’re a blogger who wants to try an alternative to AdSense.
Model: CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: None
17. PulsePoint
PulsePoint is an ad network that processes 110 billion ad transactions each month across its platform. They’re big on data-driven ad optimization—crunching about 20TB of it every day.
Their proprietary contextual ensures better ad targeting and increase relevance, giving publishers the opportunity to monetize impressions buyers would normally overlook. There are no sign up fees or hidden costs.
Model: CPM Minimum traffic: None
18. Conversant (ValueClick Media)
Conversant runs campaigns for 5,000+ brands every month, increasing the chances of finding an ideal fit for all content verticals. A real-time publisher interface offers fully transparent campaign reporting along with activity and revenue data.
Their cross-platform advertising solutions ensure that publishers are able to maximize their revenue from mobile devices.
In addition to standard display, they offer ads in multiple other formats such as in-text rollovers, static, rich media, banners, over the page and more.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: None
19. AdCash
AdCash is one of the foremost advertising networks and provides high-quality ads from leading brands and exclusive pricing models designed to effectively monetize their online content and increase revenue.
AdCash supports all industry standard as well as exclusive display formats such as site under, footer, interstitial, slide-in, background, and more. It has over 1,000 ad campaigns running on its platform—the big inventory means better ad targeting.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Minimum traffic: None
20. Chitika
A popular alternative to AdSense, Chitika has over 350,000 publishers on its network and serves over four billion ads per month, making it one of the largest ad networks in the world if you were to go by those metrics.
Its proprietary targeting and optimization technology uses programmatic buying to serve precisely the right ad, at the right time. The approval process for new publishers is usually pretty straightforward and takes little time.
Model: CPC Minimum traffic: None
21. Tribal Fusion (acquired by Exponential)
The CPM rates of Tribal Fusion is amongst the highest in the industry and they offer reliable payments, dedicated account manager, real-time reporting, and free ad-serving technology.
You can control the content of ads by blocking ad categories (i.e. gambling, religious, political, alcohol, flashing, warning, etc.) or by specific advertiser domain names.
Based on content of the website, Tribal Fusion’s server finds the best advertiser-audience fit in real-time, benefitting both the advertiser and the publisher.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV Minimum traffic: 500,000
22. WWW Promoter
WWW Promoter offers publishers high fill rates, competitive CPMs, advanced targeting, and efficient ad serving using its proprietary ad serving technology.
They focus on building a network that comprises of trusted brands and advertisers, eliminating the possibility of low-quality ads being served. The inhouse ad platform has a reporting tool that helps publishers track their CPMs in real-time.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, CPV Minimum traffic: 1,000,000
Let us know if we missed something in the comments below!
See screenshot below. 
