The Competition of Google Adsense

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contextual advertising has literally saved the Internet. With the advent of contextual ads, websites are able to focus once again on quality content, making the internet a resource for free information.

It used to be that Google Adsense was the undisputed leader in contextual ads, but now that Yahoo Publisher Network has joined the mix, and MSN coming soon as well, the contextual ad market has never been more alive, and never more profitable for publishers.

There are advantages and disadvantages to many of the different networks. This article will look at three different contextual ad networks that each spin the market in a slightly different way. We will review the benefits of these networks as well as their disadvantages.

Article Tip
We are not reviewing Google's Adsense program as most website owners are familiar with the program.


Yahoo! Publisher Network - Still in Beta Testing

Yahoo! is the biggest competition Google Adsense has seen so far, and if the early habits of the YPN! (Yahoo! Publisher Network) are any indication of what will be coming, Google should be nervous.

YPN! offers two major advantages over Google's Adsense program. The first is obvious: revenue per click. The revenue on a per click basis that YPN pays is, in our tests, significantly higher than Google's revenue per click. Although we cannot go into specifics about how much either network pays, we can say that YPN has consistently been the highest paying contextual ad network we have participated in.

The second advantage is the customer service. Yahoo! seems extremely interested in making a serious charge against Google's stronghold in the small and medium sized publisher base.

Unlike Google, Yahoo! offers phone support and is constantly looking for suggestions. Rather than waiting for people to contact them, however, Yahoo! is actually pro-actively calling their publishers to look for feedback. It appears as if they are listening as well.

With these advantages in mind, YPN! does come with some significant disadvantages. The first is the lack of relevant ads being displayed. Contextual advertising is successful because it is relevant. It is more than simple advertising, it is actually additional

content that users should be interested in. Google has mastered this concept as Omid Kordestani pointed out in this interview with John Battelle. Fortunately, YPN!'s relevancy should improve with time and data collection. This is one of the reasons they are still in beta testing.

YPN! ads also have trouble adjusting to different sizes. Google recently introduced a feature to display fewer ads while increasing the size of the ads to help a website's CTR. YPN!, on the other hand, tends to cutoff ads with an ellipses when there is not enough

space to display the entire ad. This great hurts appeal of the ad and the apparent relevancy. YPN! has also chosen a verdana font by default, which does not fit into many website's schemes, although there is reason to believe that publishers will be able to control which font is used in the future.

With all that said, YPN! is extremely promising. The problems that they do have can be fixed in their beta phase. If they are able to maintain their relatively high revenue per click, and improve on relevancy and ad displays, they will become a serious head to head competitor to Google Adsense.

Chitika MiniMalls

While every entreprenuer jumped into the contextual advertising space as a Google Adsense clone, there was one company that found a very profitable niche that Google could not fill. That company is Chitika.

Chitika approached contextual ads from an angel completely different than Google or YPN!. Rather than approach contextual ads as a regular ad network looking for advertisers and publishers, Chitika advertises existing products in online shopping malls and earns money through affiliate relationships with these online shopping malls. The publishers make money on a per click basis, just as they would with Adsense or YPN!, but the revenue per click is not based on a PPC bidding system.

Our initial fear in trying Chitika was that the revenue per click would not justify the time or effort of implementing the ads. However, when we tested these ads we found that Chitika actually

had a higher revenue per click than most contextual ad networks. And because the revenue is tied directly affiliate relationships with product based websites, there should be no worries of advertisers learning how to reduce their cost per click, thus reducing our revenue per click.

The major downside to Chitika is the same downside that YPN! suffers from: a healthy clickthrough rate. Although it is often mentioned that Chitika works much better on a product based website rather than a purely informational website, Chitika still seemed to offer a lower clickthrough rate than most. This may be due to the fact that their ads look more like ads than any of the other ad networks.

Chitika also needs to improve their reporting statistics. Currently the system is a very simplistic view of total pageviews and total clicks, along with a daily tally of revenue. For those who are trying to make a living from contextual ads, more detailed reporting is needed.

Finally, it was pointed out by Darren over at ProBlogger that Chitika can be used in conjunction with Google Adsense. There are some requirements to this, but nothing that should hurt your revenue from either network.

CB Prosense

In the same spirit as Chitika MiniMalls, CB Prosense is not a traditional contextual ad market place. CB Prosense does not look for advertisers, and they too base their network on the power of affiliate relationships.

Unlike Chitika, however, CB Prosense utilizes Clickbank to power their network. Publishers who sign up for this network are not paid on a per click basis, but rather are able to hook up their Clickbank affiliate account and earn commissions off their own ads on their website.

For blogs and other sites that contain a lot of content, this is an extremely efficient way of making money. The ads that are served have good relevancy, assuming their is a product in the Clickbank directory that matches your website content. The ads are more customizable than YPN! or Google Adsense, although they have trouble with custom sizes.

The most obvious downside to CB Prosense is the fact that it is not a free service. Publishers must pay to use the service. Although they do offer a free service, the ideal option is the paid service. CB Prosense does not keep a portion of the commissions that you earn, so their earnings are limited only to the subscription fees collected. Most publishers will recoup this fee fairly quickly.

There are other issues with CB Prosense such as reporting their ads ability to adjust to different sizes, but the overall product is solid.

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Other Contextual Ad Networks


Most networks, with the exception of YPN! and the upcoming MSN ad network, cannot compete head to head with Google Adsense. A few are trying, but the reality is that the large advertiser/publisher networks are only effective when a company the size of Google, Yahoo!, or MSN offers the network.

Contextual advertising is the future of revenue for many publishers. The introduction of competition from mammoths such as Yahoo! and MSN, as well as the introduction of specialty networks like Chitika and CB Prosense, offer web publishers a wider variety, and a higher quality, set of ads to offer their users. This will, ultimately, benefit everyone involved, from the advertiser to the publisher to the user who clicks on those ads.