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Comment by ehsanul | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to know more about what other ad networks were appraised, and why they were no good. I'm going to have to rely on ad networks for my own web app, at least for a while, and it would be pretty helpful if there was was decent customer service on the inventory side.

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I've looked at: adbrite, adroll, tribalfusion and a bunch of others after asking HN if I should go and make an inventory of advertising networks and how well they perform relative to each other.

None of them comes close to adsense in terms of performance (and adsense absolutely sucks, if you can get $1.00 ECPM out of adsense for a large volume website then you're very very lucky), so even if they would handle customer service better than google (most of them don't) they would still be pretty bad income wise.

Is that $1 ECPM for the whole site, or just one ad spot? I mean, for the whole page, which might have up to five google ad spots, or just one spot, or channel as google calls them.

ECPM per channel on large volume typically is 16cts.

So if you have multiple ad spots on a page you might increase that a bit but it's not like two adspots work out to 32 cents, the amount per spot goes down as the number of spots goes up.

I tend to do better than that.

I have some sites that do around 25 cents eCPM, most of the time I wouldn't bother with a eCPM that low... $1.50 or $2.50 is more like what I want.

I've got a project in the pipe that I'm projecting about $2000/month in ad revenue... That's based on an extrapolation from a series of smaller projects covering similar domains. Both my black hat SEO friends, legit "Web 2.0" people and people who are experts in this subject domain would all think I'm crazy, but that's exactly why I can pull this off... Nobody thinks this will work so ranking for this is like stealing candy from a baby.

Unfortunately, the average webmaster is drawn to low-eCPM topics like a moth to a flame... That's their loss.

Again are you speaking of an eCPM of 1.50 per channel or the entire page?

My page eCPM is well above $1, even £1 and per channel it is well above 16 cent and even 16 pence. So I guess it depends on the site.

I gave an average over a much larger number of sites though, some do better, some do worse, it seems to average out to about $0.16 ECPM.

You should try to find vertical ad networks, these are the ones getting the higher ECPMs ($5-$20). I run a couple programmer focused networks, but there are networks out there for just about anything. Here are some off the top of my head:

http://www.sportgenic.com/ - sports focused

http://www.glammedia.com - Gender based

http://www.halogennetwork.com - Influentials

http://www.longboardmedia.com/ - Consumers/Shopping

Thank you, that's quite helpful!

Kudos for not pumping your own stuff, but...what are these programmer focused networks?

The Lounge (.NET developers) - http://theloungenet.com

Ruby Row (Ruby developers) - http://rubyrow.net

If you don't mind graphical ads instead of text, you may want to look into Advertising.com (AOL). Good experience here (surprisingly high eCPM at times--many times higher than AdSense). Then again, our site performs better than most as far as click-thru rate is concerned, so YMMV.

Thanks, looks like text ads are also available: http://www.advertising.com/publisher/ad-formats

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