Over the years, I've tried a lot of different online ad networks. I thought it was about time to summarize my thoughts in one post. Let's start with a brief discussion of each.

• AdSense is the good old reliable web-based advertising solution. It works, I generate about half my revenues from AdSense alone. Other solutions have paid more for a week or month, but none have managed to maintain such a high revenue stream for more than a few months. That hasn't stopped everybody from saying AdSense is dead, but for me this is good, less publishers means more money in my pocket.
• Amazon doesn't pay anywhere as well as AdSense if you've tried using it as an advertising platform, but if you talk about a product, then putting an Amazon Associates link around that product is a great way of making a couple bucks. Amazon also has contextual ad network called Omakase, but it's too new to say anything concrete about.
• FeedBurner FAN is the best solution for RSS based ads. They also have website ads, but the implementation currently doesn't maximize you impressions, so it's not a very good solution at the moment. But the feed-based ads are great.
• ExpoActive is mostly broken. I enjoyed the best CPCs, even better than Google with ExpoActive. I even had 2 websites in their top publishers section. I was making some good coin, but then the website stopped working. First, I couldn't withdraw money when money was clearly available to be withdrawn. But worse, I haven't been able to approve or reject ads now for many months. I've sent them several dozen emails and they've never once responded (except the auto-responder). Last time I was able to check, I had $200-300 in direct ads and earnings that I couldn't cash out because the website was not responding.
• Chitika is a fraud. I made big money when Chitika first came out, but they invented reason after reason why my earnings, CPM, CPC were in rapid decline and when they owed me more than $100, the payment was always late.
• AdBrite is to be avoided. I made a few dollars with AdBrite, but in the last few months of usage, they started putting sex related ads on my website even though I specifically requested otherwise. When I tried to modify my ad strips, I found the website was broken and I had to remove all my AdBrite ad strips. They use to respond to support requests, but that stopped about 6 months ago.
• BlogAds was OK for awhile, but for the last 3-4 months, my earnings are exactly $0. I haven't had any new advertisers in months and I'm considering removing the ad units. Overall, there's a lack of quality.
• Bidvertiser doesn't pay. Although they advertise CPCs in the multi-dollar range, you'll end up with CPCs in the cents per click range.
• Clicksor, like Bidvertiser, doesn't pay. The earnings per click and impression were very very low, similar to Bidvertiser.
• Yahoo! Pubishers Network is for U.S. customers only. Whatever. Everything at Yahoo! is Beta and they use that as an excuse. Yahoo sucks!

In summary, everything eventually sucked, except for AdSense, Amazon Associates and FeedBurner.

I read this BusinessWeek article on click-fraud all-the-way to paragraph number two, where I read, Over the past three years, he has noticed a growing number of puzzling clicks coming from such places as Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. Since you can target AdWords to specific countries, the author and source are either ignorant or lying. The more articles I read like this, trying to scare people away from online advertising, the more I realize the author's simply haven't used the products (like AdWords) and therefor don't understand its potential.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003001.htm

Jaimie Sirovich: This is a compilation of stuff Matt Cutts has said historically.

seoegghead.com

Thanks Scott for the del.icio.us link [Play Tag with Me].

For the last few months, I've been testing FeedBurner's FAN ad network. I have to say that overall CPM's are great and that this is likely the best RSS-based ad network. I did find a couple areas that I'd like improved and I'll enumerate them here for the FeedBurner team to consider.

• Website ads only appear on blog entries that are published at the time you enable FAN or later. It would be nice to monetize large archives of blog entries, like I have on iBLOGthere4iM.
• Feature request. The ad size varies. Not a problem, but I prefer smaller ads to bigger ads and would compromise $1 CPM for a smaller ad size. I assume ad choice is by CPM. I would like a checkbox to enable ad size preference that chooses smaller ads that are near in CPM to larger ads that are slightly better paying. I could do this manually, but the effort is not worth the benefit. 

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/adnetwork

David Goetzl: Internet ad spending leaped 49 percent, compared to the first half of 2005.

Coolz0r: I noticed a message from the Google AdSense team. In that email, Google states that I violate the terms of service from AdSense by publishing ‘mature content’ or ‘adult content’.

http://blog.coolz0r.com/2006/09/06/google-doesnt-like-my-ads/

Randy: Coolz0r is looking for feedback on how to proceed with Google. I'm of the opinion that he should just let it go. What do you think? Respond on Coolz0r's blog please. Unless you want to call me an idiot, which you can simply do here.

Intrusive Google ads on Sourceforge
Originally uploaded by PeterForret.

Peter Forret is reporting intrusive Google ads on Sourceforge. I can't reproduce or confirm that this is real. It looks faked and quite dumb. I can't believe someone would actually do this.