The purpose of mentioning each ad partner that I am currently working with is to draw your attention to them one at a time so I can give an admittedly amatuer breakdown of how they each work. We’ll start from the top and work our way through them one at a time. This isn’t meant to be an indepth review of any, but a general overview of each one.

Google Adsense

Tnis is the “grand daddy” of the online advertising market. I don’t mean in terms of age, but in terms of the power they wield. Unless you’ve been dead and buried for the past 3 or 4 years you are no doubt well aware of how influential Google is. Adsense is a marketing coup in every sense of the word. Go to nearly any website out there and you’ll come across “Ads by Google”. They seem to be everywhere. And for good reason. Let’s take a quick look at what makes them so powerful.

• A trusted name. People will click where they see Google more readily than if it were an unknown company
• A household name. My grandmother at 86 years old has no clue about the internet or computers, but she knows of (if not about) Google.
• Easy to customize the ads. The interface setup is great for manipulting text and background
• Ability to run multiple campaigns at once
• Comprehensive self-help and support from the Google experts
• Extremely well documented both from Google itself and around the WWW
• No0b friendly

Honestly if I can figure out how to setup, run, and manage a Google adsense campaign anyone can do it! Just be sure to follow the rules, study the advise of others, and keep up with your Google adsense account and you’ll easily pull in the money!

Text Link Ads

I only just signed up for TLA for this domain. I had it signed up on the old domain, but never bothered to set it up properly. From what I can tell it looks like you are actually selling advertising space to third parties via TLA. It’s worth a shot and the sign up is painless and quick. If it turns out not to work out I can just remove the TLA links and sell that space directly to advertisers. I do like that they give you 50% of the sale price for each text link ad sold off your website through our system. Not sure yet if the sale is per day, week, or month but either way 50% is still 50%!

Bidvertiser

It was at the recommendation of John Chow that I decided to try out Bidvertiser. Not a direct recommendation, but based on a post of his that I dug up when I was reading through his blog. Experimenting with them has been interesting over the past few weeks. Originally I gave them a permanent spot and they always appeared, but I’ve decided as I make posts if it is long enough (such as this one) I will insert the code at appropriate intervals to break up the page a bit. Not sure what to expect, but to be honest the return for the work hasn’t been anything to write home about for when it comes to Bidvertiser.

Ad Bright

A friend originally pointed me to Ad Bright and then the same John Chow post that turned me on to Bidvertiser brought them back to the front of my mind. I’ve choosen to use the banner ads only at this point, though I might well end up dropping Kontera and going with both the banner and the in-line ads provided by Ad Bright. That remains to be seen at this point. Another week or two of Kontera to see if there is any change in the performance.

Auction Ads

By far this is the adspot that gets the most clicks on any given day. Unfortunately it is PPA (pay per action) advertiser so if people don’t buy the item they click on I get nothing out of it. I really like having Auction Ads on the site, but I’m starting to think that moving things around and placing a PPC (pay per click) in their place might make better sense from a revenue standpoint.

Kontera

Without beating around the bush I’m not at all happy with how Kontrea has been performing for me. Despite a couple of thousand impressions and my pages often being saturated with Kontra in-text links I’ve managed less than one dollar from them. To my way of thinking that’s a pretty poor return on time. Two other things I’m not to fond of. Their reporting is a day behind (if not more) and they serve really bizare ads for the keywords they choose to highlight on your page. An example is they have the words “stage magic” highlighted and the add popping up if for shopping.com. Not sure how one relates to the other, but ok. It should be noted that in order to get a Kontera account you either need to have a huge amount of traffic or get a special code. Check out this page for details of what to do if you choose to sign up.

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