That’s how it is sometimes. I wonder if Fall and Winter are the two best seasons for online advertising revenue. At Rotten Tomatoes, it has always been Summer because that’s when the biggest films are released. Outside of movie sites, I’m not sure.
I’ve just noticed that in the past couple weeks, I’m getting more revenue from my ad networks. CPM and CPC rates are up. The bad news is my traffic is down, so it kinda just evens out. Oh well. I should be happy that they’re not both down.
Ad Network Rankings in Terms of Revenue
My best performing ad network in the past few weeks have been AdsDaq, which has now reverted to its parent company’s name ContextWeb. Infolinks has also went up considerably. Casale, PubAccess, and Chitika have been steady. In terms of total revenue, here’s how they line-up: AdsDaq, Casale, Infolinks, PubAccess, and Chitika. Chitika’s performance has dropped considerably since I first started with them.
Shelved AdBrite’s Full Page Ads
I shelved AdBrite even though they’re one of the top performers in terms of overall revenue; I was using their high-paying Full Page ads (pre-interstitials). I already have Casale delivering pop-unders, so having AdBrite for Full Page ads is overkill. It’s one or the other. I think pop-unders are less annoying. Besides, AdBrite’s rate had dropped from $5 to $1CPM for Full Page Ads, which was way below Casale’s Pop-unders. I also noticed that my traffic has been dropping, and I’ve read in the past that they’ve been the culprit for it for other sites. The evidence has only been anecdotal, but I did notice a slight traffic boost since I dropped them. Again, it’s only annecdotal, and there’s really no clear evidence for it. I’ll use them again when their rates go up, or when I want to save up for a purchase.
AdSide Anchor
I tried out and shelved AdSide. They’re a new pay per click ad network that serves a non-intrusive text ad unit that sits in the corner of the web browser. My performance has been up and down with them. There are days when I make nothing, and there are days when it makes as much as Chitika. It’s probably the worst performing ad unit, but it’s a relatively small ad unit that’s not too annoying. It behaves like the Meebo toolbars, except it takes up less space. Another problem with AdSide Anchor is that the iPad's browser doesn't support it, so you would get an annoying error message on each page containing the ad; that gets pretty irritating very quickly. Still, I’ll use them occasionally if I’m saving up for a purchase.
At first I was hesitant about shelving AdBrite and AdSide because of the loss in revenue; AdBrite was once my top revenue generator. The recent rate increase for my remaining ad networks probably makes up the difference. The site is probably less annoying too. For my regular users, they probably don’t notice; I don’t serve any ads on the homepage or any of the main channels.
