One challenge that I’ve encountered, that other bloggers also seem to struggle with, is keeping my ad spaces full of paying advertisers. While I’ve made a good amount of money offering private advertising, it’s been fairly sporadic. Sure I can fill the empty space with affiliate banners or even some different CPA offers, but keeping track of which ads were purchased when, which affiliate ads I should swap out, and keeping the different codes straight can really get to be a hassle.

To help solve this issue, I’ve decided to give AdBrite a try. AdBrite is basically a large marketplace where blogs and websites of all kind can place advertising space up for auction. Advertisers, in turn, are able to search the marketplace for sites that match their needs and bid on the ad space available on those sites. I’ve recently been using the site from an advertiser standpoint at my day job, and I’ve been so impressed with how it works that I’ve decided to give it a shot from the other side of the coin.

Since I’ve decided to use it, I figured I’d give you guys my thoughts on it so you can decide whether it might be an option for your blog. The sign up process is fairly standard and once you register and log in, you’re taken to a dashboard page. Naturally I wanted to get right down to business and clicked the “Create New Adzone” link. AdBrite allows you to break your site and ad space up into several different zones, for instance, “header right” or maybe “Top of right hand sidebar” etc. This allows advertisers to get an idea of where their ad will appear and how much they’d like to pay accordingly.

Anyway, after selecting the type of ad I wanted (image, text, full page etc) the first thing I noticed was the lack of options in terms of ad sizes. They only offer 5 different ad sizes! Now sure, they’re the standard sizes (728×90, 468×60, 120×600, 160x 600 and 300×250) but I was pretty disappointed. I mean in this day and age of millions of millions of bloggers, and you don’t offer 125×125 as an ad source? So, unfortunately, implementation of the new ad option isn’t going to be as easy as I’d hope. I could cut the 125×125 ad blocks down to 2 and put a 300×250 block below them, but I’m not quite sure how that would look. The other ad sizes aren’t really conducive to my design as it sits currently.

So while I’d love to give you the rest of my thoughts on this new experimental ad source, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to please excuse my dust for the next day or so. I’ve been getting better and better at manipulating this theme (it’s versatility continues to impress me), but I also have a tendency to break things. I’m hoping to have the ads up by sometime tomorrow and I’ll share with you the rest of my impressions and thoughts on the process. Until then, I’d love to hear whether anyone else out there has given AdBrite a try as a publisher. I’ve been VERY pleased with them from an advertiser’s standpoint but so far, the publisher experience leaves a bit to be desired. I know I almost always say this, but if you’ve tried it out, please do share your experiences and opinions in the comment section below.

Added: While I haven’t managed yet to create an ad zone, I did discover AdBrite’s referral program. It pays out 50% of AdBrite’s profit on all buying and selling activity referred by my site for three months, and 10% for six more months after that. Remember, that’s AdBrite’s profit, nothing comes out of the publishers’ pockets, so, if you do decide to test AdBrite out for yourself, I’d appreciate it if you sign up via the image in this post.  Thanks!

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