Beginners Guide to Third Party Ad Networks

If you are looking to earn a small residual income from your blog then the easiest way to do so is by displaying third party ads on your pages. But, what exactly do I mean by a third party ad? Though huge organizations like Yahoo!, Youtube, FaceBook etc. can lure in advertisers on their own as a small time blogger you will be best advised to rely on an agency like Google Adsense which has 1000s of network ads from 100s of different advertisers which it will rotate amongst all the various sites and pages in their system. Such third party ad servers are mainly of 3 types and here's a quick look.

Cost Per Click ( CPC )
As the name suggests, CPC ad providers will pay you a share of the revenue they generate when a valid click is registered on one of their adblocks on your site. The keyword here is click. CPC ad networks are possibly the most popular and often the only alternative available to small publishers and bloggers.

Some popular CPC ad networks available to site with almost no requirement include: 

1. Bidvertiser
2. Taggify
3. Chitika (before signing up be sure to read about the Chitika    Revenue Audit)

Cost Per Mile ( CPM )
Here the name is somewhat of a misnomer. What CPM or cost per mile basically means is the amount money paid to you for a specific number of page views (typically 1000). CPM ad providers usually restrict their service to large (over 100,000 views a month) and those who do serve ads to small publishers and bloggers usually offer very poor rates (around $1/1000 views) and will not be worth your while. Another issue with CPM ad providers is that sometimes they don't monetize traffic from all the countries. But the great benefit of CPM ads is they convert traffic directly into revenue without any worries about poor click through rates.

Some popular CPM ad networks include:

1. Tribal Fusion
2. Casale Media
3. Burst Media

A Combination of CPC and CPM

Many sites also offer both CPC and CPM ads. This is how the system usually works: you get to fix  a CPM rate for your site. One or more advertisers may bid for that space in your website. But until anyone agrees to pay your minimum CPM rate you will be served (usually low paying) CPC ads called "network ads".

Some such sites are:

1. Adbrite
2. Adhitz

Other Kind of Ad networks

There are several other kinds of ad netwroks as well such as:

1. In-line ad networks (Infolink, Konterra, Text Link Ads)
2. Pop-up or pop-under and similar ad netwroks (Affinity)
3. Ad networks which monetize outgoing links (Taggify, Link Bucks)

Online Publishers Beware of the Chitika Revenue Audit

Undoubtedly, Chitika is one of the most popular Google Adsense alternatives and many people swear by their service and often they are the only option for Bukisa and Infobarrel contributers who do not have an approved Adsense account.


Definitely Chitika has a lot of advantage over Google Adesense, but an issue that has been coming up a lot in the recent past in a number of forums is the highly controversial Chitika Revenue Audit, and you will be best advised to know about this before signing up for Chitika Publisher Network.


What is a Revenue Audit?
In case you have not yet guessed what a revenue audit is, it simply means evaluating or rather estimating the number of VALID clicks (as decided by your Ad server's T & C) and paying you accordingly. This amount will be definitely lower than or equal to the raw data displayed on your account dashboard which is displayed throughout the month (assuming your ad provider pays Net 30).


Is the Revenue Audit Unique to Chitika?
NO! If you would care to read through the fine print, you will find that almost all ad providers including Google Adsense performs a revenue audit before charging their advertisers and paying their publishers. This is the reason why some ad providers will tell you your ESTIMATED earning for the month is $x.y


So What is Wrong with the Chitika Audit?
The concern with the Chitika audit is that they are regularly decreasing the raw amount earned from your site by around 20-30% and may even be as high as 90% according to some publishers whereas for Adsense the numbers are almost always less than 10% and generally varies between 2-5%.
According a forum post one publisher allegedly had his earning reduced from $28.03 for 44 clicks to $3.05 for 4 VALID clicks!


So Is Chitika a Scam?
Chitika is positively NOT a scam in the sense that they always pay your audited revenue on time, in fact they are probably the best Adsense alternative available in terms of the ability to serve contextual ads on your site and has a remarkably high click through rate. However, whether their auditing technique is faulty is a totally different issue. And before we get too judgmental, bear in mind click frauds are not entirely unheard of and it is just possible that some unscrupulous  publishers may have taken the efficiency of the Chitika click tracking system a bit too lightly.


My Personal Take on the Chitika Audit
I have had no personal experience with the Chitika audit yet, and would stick with Chitika at least until I get approved by Adsense. I will just have to be careful I don't buy that DSLR camera I'm after before my Chitika earning is safely deposited to my Paypal account.