Make Money Online With AdBrite


Adbrite

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!

Author: Ben

13 Comments to “Make Money Online With AdBrite”
  1. Does adbrite play nice with ads sold through other services as well, or are they fairly stingy about that?

  2. @Jeremy AdBrite doesn’t really have any exclusivity clauses in their ToS. You can use AdSense, or whatever else, with them if you want.

    I used to use AdBrite, but I my success was mixed (I started using them back when they only had one ad size: flexible). On one website, I had managed to sell an ad at $25/mo for about three months. Webmaster-Source never had any such luck. I would make a little PPC revenue off their “network ads” that they show if no one’s buying directly. In other words: Your mileage will vary.

    I do like their payment holds a lot. The default is $25, but you could easily set to $5.

  3. @ redwall, another bit of info I couldn’t find was the percentage that they keep. Any idea on that?

    Also, did you sell adspace per time period or per impression? The ads I’ve been buying have been per impression which is nice because it assures me a specific number of impression for the money I’m spending. I’m hoping that using AdBrite on this site will have the same affect for advertisers.

  4. Ben…the sidebar on this theme is 290 pixels so you will have a tough time to squeeze the 300 pixel wide ad into it. You can probably expand it to 300 ish pretty easily and cut down the content width.

    10-20 pixels shouldn’t make that much difference.

  5. @ BlogEntrepreneur, I found that out the hard way… it’s definitely not going to go smoothly lol. Time to dig into the css I suppose… ugh.

  6. I was getting interested right up until the point you mentioned they don’t support 125×125 banners. How silly in todays age!

  7. The last I remember, AdBrite gives off porn ads…

    BTW Ben, you seem to have never answered my question on if you read the review I did for you or not…

    -Mike

  8. Mike, I did read it, thanks for the suggestions. Today’s post actually addresses part of what you mention.

  9. @Ben I sold them for fixed amounts of time.

  10. I’ve been using Adbrite for about a year and have found it a bit hit and miss.

    I earn about $0.20 a month from it.

  11. Damn, this would look really promising if they offered 125X125 ads. My blog just doesn’t have the space for anything larger :(

  12. I’ve tried AdBrite a few times as both an advertiser and publisher. I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the results, especially as a publisher. I kind of keep them in my backpocket now for situations where I don’t want to use Adsense/Adwords.

    As for rotating ads, I use the AdRotator plugin for my affiliate links and free 125×125 buttons and this works rather well. I can swap out ads by simply uploading a new text file with the links.

  13. I get around 1k users a day to my site, http://www.liquid-security.net , and made 3.14 my first day, so if I could make that each day it would be very beneficial, and will get me liking adbrite more and more.

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