While AdSense is probably one of the best money making machines if you have quality content and a lot of traffic, there are lots of other AdSense alternativesout there. Some of them are only suitable for sites with 100,000+ monthly page impressions and more, others can be used by sites with low traffic. The key to understand is that when you are looking for an AdSense alternative, you should try several solutions, one at a time and seeing what works the best. No general advice can tell you the best solution for you. The best results are achieved through a trial-and-error method.
The following table provides a listing of programs, which can be used as an alternative to AdSense (and AdSense too), if for some reason you can't use AdSense. Also notice that some of the these programs can be combined with AdSense, without breaking Google's TOS.
I've tried only a few of those programs, so the information was collected from the programs' websites and quite a few of them don't disclose much information. I'm not sure whether they will disclose that information after you sign up either. If you discover any updates for this table please email those to me and I'll update the table. Thanks!
Here is the explanation of the abbreviations used in this table:
- Company - Link to the site
- Ad Placement Models:
- Sell Ad Space - you place the link on the site and the buyer buys the right to put ads on your site
- Contextual - your page is parsed and the most relevant (in theory) ads are automatically displayed
- Keywords - you choose the keywords and ads based on those keywords are displayed
- Revenue Models:
- PPC (CPC) - pay per click (cost per click)
- PPM (CPM) - pay per impression, usually pay per 1000 views
- PPL - pay per lead (e.g. survey, form, download trial)
- PPA - pay per action or acquisitioni (e.g. sale)
- Investment: - whether you need to pay upfront
- Payout - How much $$$ you can make. Either you get paid % of the revenue generation by ad or the bid
- Notes - extra comments
