List of Best Google AdSense Alternatives

Google’s online content monetization service known as AdSense is widely considered to be the best of its kind. It gives bloggers and online publishers the simplest entry-point towards making money from their blogs and/or websites. It does so by serving different types of text, image and various rich-media ads that are relevant to the content of the site. It offers the best payout rate, gives publishers perhaps the largest selection of ads to choose from, and allows them to monetize global traffic.

But I digress, and you can read more about how AdSense functions on their support page. The point of this article is to list down just some of the best Google AdSense alternatives out there. Yes, as far as monetizing your content is concerned, there’s life beyond AdSense. In fact, there are some pretty great alternatives present that allow you to earn money from off your website or blog. So without further ado…

1. AdBrite

One of the biggest, best and the closest alternatives to AdSense right now is AdBrite. It is a PPC (pay-per-click) based service, that offers conventional banner-based advertisements, full-page ads, as well as inline page links with a great CTR.  Their payout rates are quite competitive, and in some cases, even more than other services, like AdSense. The reason behind this is that the revenues is split 75/25 between the publisher and AdBrite; one of the highest in the industry. AdBrite is also understood to be much more lenient when it comes to acceptance into the program, which is ideal for small bloggers.

2. Chitika

Chitika also functions in a way that is similar to AdSense. It displays CPC-based ads (contextual-only), and all are ads are relevant to the content and subject of your website. The ads can be customized. Chitika is understood to be a good service for blogs in the product reviews or the sales niches. Like AdSense, Chitika offers search-targeted ads, mobile ads, and local ads. The payout rate is just $10, and payments are made through PayPal or via cheque (payout for cheques is $50). Besides the ads, Chitika also offers a great referral program that allows you to rake in 10% of what the referred person earns! Chitika can be used alongside AdSense without violating any rules or terms of agreement, so if you’re already using AdSense, you can also use Chitika (just make sure that the link color is different for both). Unlike AdSense, Chitika is best-suitable (read: most-profitable) for websites getting traffic from UK or the US.

3. Clicksor

Clicksor is another popular AdSense alternative that offers a whole host of interesting features for webmasters and online publishers from all niches. Clicksor offers text, image, flash, animarion, banner, pop-up/under-based ads, as well as other unconventional ad types including interstitial and DHTML ads types. Clicksor’s minimum payout rate is $50, and the service allows publishers to take home as much as 85% of the ad income, which is not only very competitive, but leaves its competition in the dust! All payments are made through PayPal, wire transfer or cheques after every 15 days. Like Chitika, Clicksor also offers an affiliate program that bags you 10% of your referrer’s income!

4. Infolinks

Infolinks is an extremely well-known in-line text-ad network that displays ads related to the content of your website. It is one of the biggest AdSense alternatives, widely-regarded to be more suitable to websites with a high amount of traffic. What the service does is convert keywords present in the content on your website into ad links, and you get money for each click made on those links/ads. The revenue is shared 70/30 in your favor, which is pretty good, and payments are made through the usual channels (PayPal, Cheque, Bank/Wire Transfer, etc) after the payout rate of $50 is reached. If you have a website that gets a fairly large amount of traffic and page views, it might be worth it to explore Infolinks; the approval process doesn’t take more than a day.

5. Kontera

Kontera is pretty similar to Infolinks in many respects. Like Infolinks, Kontera serves text-based ads. The links to these ads are added within your content, based on certain keywords present in the text, showing double-underlined text and pop-up ads. While Infolinks is more suited for high-traffic websites, Kontera is much more lenient and flexible in terms of its acceptance criteria, as it also accepts low-traffic websites into its network. The program, like many others on this list, is PPC-based, and hence your earnings will be directly proportional to your CTR. Payout limit starts at $50, and payment options include cheque or PayPal.

6. BuySellAds

BuySellAds, as the name implies, allows you to buy ads as a publishers, or sell them as an advertiser. From a publisher’s perspective, you simply go on their website, and essentially buy ads from the website, or in other words, sell ad-space to advertisers. So the BuySellAds website essentially acts as marketplace that brings publishers and advertisers at one place. If, for instance you have an ad space on your blog, you can put it up on the website and advertisers interested in putting an ad on your website will be able to get in touch with you. BuySellAds gives 75% of the revenue to the publisher (payout rate is $50), however you need to have a large amount of traffic and visitors on your website in order to be an attractive-enough prospect for potential advertisers. Mind you, getting approved is not as easy as some of the other websites listed here.

7. Amazon Affiliate Program

While not a CPM or PPC-based ‘content monetization service’, Amazon Affiliate (also referred to as Amazon Associates) is a brilliant solution to earn money for product and review-based blogs. Amazon, as I’m sure you know, is one of the largest online stores out there, and earning money through their affiliate program is as simple as joining up, advertising their products on your website, and earning a percentage of the sale (aka. commission) every time someone uses your link to buy something off their website. Amazon allows you to put image-based as well as text-based ads of products of your choice anywhere on your blog. The commission rate is as much as 10% (it varies with products), which means that you get 10% of everything sold through your marketing efforts. So it all depends on what kind of sales you make; a single sale worth $2000 could potentially put $200 in your pocket! And yes, it can be used alongside AdSense.