What is the best Advertising Program? Google Adsense vs. Adbrite and Etology

[hendricius]

What is better? Google ADsense, Adbrite or Etology? Where do you earn more money and what are the differences? How can you improve your income as a Publisher? Should I use referral-advertisments like Zanox? Is it really possible to make 40 000 $ a year just with Advertisments? I will give you a short introduction here about moneytizing your website.

There are dozens of Advertisments program nowadays so that for newbies it is getting more difficult from day to day to find the correct solution for their Website. I have been using Advertisment-programs since the beginning of this year and started in February with Google-ADsense. Adsense is easy to set up and configurable. Here a short definition:

AdSense is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. Google is also currently beta-testing a cost-per-action based service.

Google offers a lot, here some points:
-Content related advertisments. Google reads the META of your Websites and then automatically compares the Keywords with Keywords out of their Database to finally display Content-related Advertisments. An Example: you are making a website about Guitars. People find your Website via Search-Engines, directly or referring sites. Google will display advertisments about guitars on your website. As the User usually found your website over Search-Engines, he is interested in guitars and voilá sees guitar advertisments. The chance of clicking is increased because he sees what he is interested in.
-Pay-Per Click. The amount you get depends on the Content displayed. Usually it is around 5-10 Cent per Click which you earn. This increases if you make a website about for example Cancer Protection. Google pays most for Cancer-Websites 30-50 Cent and then on the second place Websites which have content related to life insurances.
-Allmost all advertisment formats available. Squares, Banners, Skyscrappers, Boxes, Leaderboard-banners and Link-ADs. Searchengine Advertisments which allow you to place a custom google search Engine on your website.
-Bad Referral Campaigns. E.G you redirect somebody to Google and make him install Mozilla-Firefox in combination with the Google Toolbar. You will get 1 Dollar. I do not like this kind of referral programs as they are not cookie based. Google Earth, Talk, Maps and other Google-Software are other methods of making income through referral-campaigns.
-One falseclick can lead to the suspension of your Google-Adsense account. They have very strict rules. I keep reading more and more reports from users who have been permanently banned from Google-Adsense. Mass missclicks from one ip can get you banned too, means if somebody does not like you he can keep clicking our Advertisments to suspend your Google Account (yes, I have heared of that). Google stores your IP and Hostname whenenver you log into your Google Account (mail, analytics whatever) and once any false-clicks are suspicous you will first recieve a warning via email and then a suspension if you do not immediatley start stickying their guidelines.
-Payouts are monthly and in USDollars $. Another bad point as the dollar course is currently extremly low. Europeans with Euro as national currency are losing about 30 percent of their old income because of low dollar exchange-rates.
-78.5% payout as recently published in the New-York-Times. Read here. The outpay-rates are rather high (if they are true what I do not think so)
-Detailed Statistics. You can see when and how often Users clicked selected advertisments.
-Registration is quite complicated.
-Creditcard or directly to your bankaccount
-My Rating 4/5

Adbrite is another AD-Serving Website that pays per Click or per month. AdBrite serves ads on more than 45,000 websites, according to their published stats and is the 10th largest ad network on the Internet (MediaMatrix). Adbrite also has a subcompany for Adult-Advertisments - AVN Ads: The Internet's Adult Ad Marketplace.
-All kind of Adzones available. Banner, Square, Leaderboard, Skyscrapper and customizable Form. Also available: Inline Advertisments and D-Layer HTML Popup advertisments. You can adjust all colours and styles of the AD-Zone.
-You have to enter general Keywords for your site upon launching an advertisment campaign to determine your websites Keywords. As you usually do not know more that 20 keywords, adbrite usually does not display very content related advertisments. A clear point against Adbrite, for google. I have never seen a content related Advertisment whenever I saw pages with Adbrite.
-You can set pricing for Advertisment-Zones. This allows advertisers to buy advertisments directly for some days or weeks even months on your website for a specific amount of money. That is really helpfull as you have that money safe then. A clear pro for Adbrite.
-You need to setup Adzones on Adbrite but unfortunately the process of setting those up is rather long and complicated. It always annoyed me as you have to enter Keywords yourself and need to double check all settings (there are many settings).
-It takes ages till your Adzones start working (if they ever work correctly) - usually about 6 hours.
-You have a personal link which you can give to friends to recruit them. This is rather usefull as your income increases with the amount of friends referred. At the end you get 15 percent bonus on your income.
-Very easy signup process. Took me less than a minute
-via Creditcard or Check
-My Rating 3/5

Etology is a new Advertisment network in clean Web 2.0 design. The design, layout and configuration is very easy. Signup, setup an Adzone, putin Keywords, have your Ads displayed, get money.
-Etology pays 75 percent of the money which advertizers invest into your website.
-Erotic Advertisments available. You may display etology advertisments on websites with adult content.
-You need to enter Keywords which can not keep up with Google and their content-related AD-system. This leads to bad/false advertisments commonly. As consequence, less clicks and less income.
-Advertisers can directly buy Advertisments on your website. You place the ADs somewhere and you can adjust the pricing for X-days of displaying yourself. You get about 75 percent of the money earned which is quite a lot. This allows you to skip the Pay by Click advertisments. Unfortunately it takes time to get people to buy advertisments on your website.
-Setting up adzones is very easy and fully customizable.
-You have your own personal referring Link. Once you refer another user you get 20 % of etologys comission.
-PayPal Support, Creditcard or directly to your bankaccount
-My Rating 4/5

Zanox is an advertising company which uses referral methods for paying Users. Users click on the banner on your website and then purchase something on the other Website which leads your Account to earn usually about 15% of the traffic. There are ofcourse other programs where you are paid by sale or paid per contract. There are not many advertisers for who you can advertise, so the chance of finding a program with keywords similiar to the ones on your website is rather low.
-You have to choose Adzones and can not customize them yourself
-Only a few Advertisers for who you can advertise
-Strange Payout system. I have not yet been paid even after 2 months. Your advertise partners can choose whetter "Real"sales happened or not. This allows them to easily cheat you and betray your money.
-The better you design your website the more money you will get. If people tend to buy a lot of products on your partners website you can become rich with those affiliate programs
-Good and stable partners like Ebay, Jamster, Jamba
-Payout via Creditcard or directly to your Bankaccount.
-My Rating 3.5/5

There are ofcourse more Websites for advertising. I will try to keep this article updated. Advertising is always very dependent on the Website you are trying to moneytize. I found out that Google is the best choice for websites with low-User impressions. If you find direct partners try to set up a contract with them as fast as you can. 25 % more income through direct partners is quite a lot. For bigger websites I recommend etology or Zanox. Zanox is a good choice if you are owning a website for example about traveling or buying cars. Etology is better for something similar to Newspaper websites, Forums, Blogs or Gaming websites.

[Glupus]

TV works better

[Velocity]

Sure... GLupus, why doesn't he go head and use comcast spotlight or something lol.

Anyways hendricius, I haven't had enourmous experience with any advertising, I do other things, but I know enough I think to say, that google is the best way to go. Their an enourmous corporation used by nearly everyone I know. Their search engines are the best and the fastest and their keyword targeting is great. Already through this site, and through searches on google, I've clicked advertisements that appealed to me, and bought something! So my thought on the situation is of course that Google will get you the most hits and the most money, plus it's notoriously easier to use.

However you would probably do well to get more than my opinion.