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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about adding ads to a website like this. Is there really no alternative to Google?

I've been reviewing self-service ad sales & serving plugins for Wordpress sites and my conclusion would be: no, there isn't.

Bing?

We use advanced ads pro for Wordpress and it seems to work well enough for serving self-hosted ads.

What are you looking for that it or others don’t offer?

There are a handful of decent "adsense/manage your own ads" and "add adsense to your site" plugins, but the self-service model wasn't rich with options. The few I did start testing had bumpy roads for implementing and managing the integration into the template.

I didn't test this one.

Appreciate the recommendation... will look into it further.

Monopoly it is, then.

For a small site, Amazon Associates is probably the most reliable and non-shady opportunity besides Google. If the site get's a few million pageviews a month, options improve.

If you're in a niche area you could try selling ads directly to relevant companies, preferably with a geographical connection

This is what my company does and it works well enough, though your site would need a reasonable amount of traffic or industry clout before an ad-buyer would take your email/call seriously.

>...though your site would need a reasonable amount of traffic

Any insight on what a reasonable amount of traffic amounts to based on your experience?

My knowledge is primarily for professional industries as opposed to consumer, but it would likely depend greatly on your target audience.

I don’t remember specifically but I feel like we probably moved off Adsense when we were around 50k uniques/mo, but for a fairly specific niche.

One idea is to investigate who advertises on similar sites and examine their traffic/rates to see where you match up.

You can move to a cost per acquisition model, where you get paid when your traffic converts. There are tons of those around (including the Amazon program below)

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