An ideal setup is one in which you utilize about a handful of different companies in the "Tier 2" position. Probably no more than a handful though, because after that it gets hard to manage and rather convoluted.

Tier 1 is your directly sold ads (stuff you sell on your own directly to an advertiser or through a company like BuySellAds).

Tier 2 is where the AdSense's of the world will live. It really depends on your "niche", but in general the best options tend to be: AdSense, Rubicon Project (if you're big enough), PubMatic (again, if you're big enough), or a "niche/vertical" ad company that focuses on sites like yours. By-and-large, AdSense "owns" this space outright, and even if you're using a program like ours (http://buysellads.com/publishers/unreserved) for your "non-reserved" inventory (stuff that isn't sold direct) there's going to be SOME mix of AdSense (or AdX) in there.

Ad money certainly isn't easy, and more and more is going to go toward those publishers creating great content and curating high-value audiences (i.e. not user generated content...). The days of "set it and forget it" are over for most publishers who aren't interested in earning pennies on the dollar. If you can't sell ads directly through a service like BuySellAds or on your own, well, I wish you luck :)

It's not all doom and gloom though - we see publishers make quite a bit of money all the time. It ultimately comes down to the quality of their site, it's content, and the users.

We've been considering BuySellAds because of the high quality of the ads we see them run on other sites.

I'd love to see if we can help debunk your advertisers' fears.

I'm afraid the issue is not as black and white as I'd like it to be.

I do not believe that Google would intentionally punish sites for buying legitimate advertising.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7675109

I'm seeing this practice increasing and spreading. It must be effective.

I've seen it on some big web properties. The other day I was browsing the Guardian and boom, iTunes opened. If spent some time afterwards on my PC and Fiddler duplicating the views using a faked user agent to watch the redirects and cookies. It is slyly done. Normally it only happens once per session. They drop a cookie so that they don't persistently annoy the user, just once in a while.

http://imgur.com/cfdFdvd

There is no link to click on

Your other options for mixing stuff in with AdSense would be to find some fairly targeted affiliate programs; however, it's tedious and requires quite a bit of upkeep.

[1] http://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/as-ipo-dust-settles-rub...

TLDR: casale, Lijit, technorati are working best for me.

This was incredibly damaging to my reputation. I narrowed it down to Lijit after toggling my ad networks and informed them of the issue. I emailed them, explained how my users are getting these redirects on a daily basis, how this is unacceptable, and how I'll have to pull their ads until they're able to resolve the issue. Their response? They didn't care, they just said, we understand your concern for not wanting to continue our relationship. That was it, they're not looking into it, they didn't apologize, nothing.

I tried them again last month, after I cut them for the previous 6 months. Within a day, I had over a dozen users sending reports about malicious redirects. I disabled Lijit, and things were fine. I used Lijit for 8 months without trouble, and enjoyed their service since the interface is decent, rates competitive, tracking and payments done right, etc. However, since these issues started, I have no choice but to leave. It's sad they have no interest in solving them, because like I said, they have potential. Redirecting my visitors to malware though, and allowing that on the network? It's inexcusable.

Basically, figure out the theme of your blog and what kind of people it attracts and then find affiliate programs for that.

For example. Let's say your tutorials are for developers. What do developers need?

* development tools * hosting * further courses/learning

That will yield a pretty good list of affiliates that will convert well such as:

* New Relic * Digital Ocean * TeamTreeHouse

(respectively). You'll make much more cash, and it'll work better for your site. [Checkout my site](http://antjanus.com/) for instance. I have a TeamTreeHouse ad (affiliate) which makes me a solid $X every month. The adsense ad underneath makes about $X/100 (it was slightly better when it was at the top of the sidebar but still made only a fraction of what the TTH ad made). I also have an ad for Bootstrap themes on my Bootstrap tutorials. That ad makes about $X/2 BUT my teamtreehouse ad performed at $X/25 for those articles, makes sense?

Anyways, I'm getting rid of adsense in favor of my own "ad network".

EDIT A good example of other people doing this is [TechPro](http://tech.pro) (I worked there briefly during the first sprint to make a pre-alpha whatever) which has its own ad serving network and directly serves affiliate programs.

Success is the key to how your relationships go. Get too successful and chances are the company you have an affiliate agreement with will get tired of paying out large sums to you (sound familiar?) They will either kill your relationship outright, or replicate your business model first and then kill your relationship once it's taken hold.

Also, other affiliates will do whatever they can to sabotage your efforts.

The best defense to all of these shenanigans is diversification and direct ad sales.

Google may or may not screw you on AdSense, and your affiliate "partner" may or may not to the same. They key is to be ready and have an alternative waiting in the wings for when it happens (and trust me it will if you have success)

An affiliate is a "marketer on commission". Much like a salesman on commission.

>Get too successful and chances are the company you have an affiliate agreement with will get tired of paying out large sums to you (sound familiar?) They will either kill your relationship outright, or replicate your business model first and then kill your relationship once it's taken hold.

This is like saying if a salesman gets too successful at his company, they will fire him and make the sales themselves.

I've never heard of this happening, and it would be idiotic to do. A company gets essentially free money from their affiliates. They take no risk and get marketers that are much smarter than the ones that are on the job market working for them. This is a dream for pretty much every company. Even Google has affiliate programs.

>Also, other affiliates will do whatever they can to sabotage your efforts.

This is like saying your fellow salesmen will sabotage your efforts.

Nope. Remember, people aren't against you, they are for themselves. Affiliates WILL copy what you are doing if you're successful, but that happens in sales as well. And who cares? The best will still be the best because they will come up with better things.

But this is irrelevant, because if you do what the parent comment says, they can't copy you unless they take control of your site.

>and trust me it will if you have success

Why should I trust you? What experience do you have? It sounds like you're exaggerating something you read somewhere.

Outside of that, I never reached the volume where I had to worry about the pay outs myself.

But I have worked for companies that HAVE reached a VERY high volume (read: millions in affiliate sales) and they had no problem either, as long as a contract was signed outside of the regular affiliate program to control traffic, cost, etc. I think that's the only reasonable thing you can do: have a direct partnership with another company once the volume reaches a critical mass.

Having an alternative is, of course, a must-have. Or rather, like you said, diversification. Having multiple affiliates, multiple working relationships.

I don't agree with you on direct ad sales. It doesn't mitigate anything. It's the same deal as the rest of the advertising world, nothing special about it.

Teespring (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder and t-shirt addict) can be an effective tool for doing just this. We ship hundreds of thousands of products each month, you get retail quality products and margins as though you were paying up front.

Absolutely no risk and no costs. You'll never pay us a penny, we only make money if you do.

Then you may charge per download, or full access based on recurring membership fee.

You may also offer free membership to capture emails and then market to interested visitors further.

Whoring your traffic to other people's platforms or products leaves no residual value to you and makes you vulnerable to other people TOS'es, moods and playrules.

The point is to use Google what it's good for - to send you prospects.

Your task is to capture prospect's contacts and establish relationships with them.

Begging for Adsense peanuts is unsustainable strategy as many people are finding out the hard way.

(PS: I worked on bulding membership site software that allows you to do just that with a few clicks)

My other thought was to put new articles up with a community-based bitcoin paywall. Basically if we receive "X" donations from the community, this article becomes public forever. I'm not sure how that will be received by our user base though (tech, web developers).

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-woocommer...

Feel free to utilize it for that purpose. It could be a great strategy.

Chitika customer support here! Our ad network is often used by those who cannot get AdSense approval but who still have high-quality sites. You can even test us out alongside AdSense -- we've found most publishers who use Chitika AND AdSense make more money than those who use AdSense alone.

We have search-targeted text, display, mobile, in-text, pop-out, and highlight ads available to all of our publishers.

Feel free to drop me a line at support@chitika.com if you or your friend have any questions. We can take a look at your blog and suggest certain ad types & placements that would work well for your specific blog. :)

Top Rated Hybrids, Dividend Income Funds, Best Tablets, Best Cars, Best Stocks To Buy, and Luxury SUVs.

Is there a way for me to indicate which category my site is in?

I also got ads with ugly green buttons. Is there a way for me to prevent this ad scheme?

Also, is there any way for me to change the color of the links?

Thanks!

Because that shady practice is really starting to annoy me.

I've now had to enable parental controls (for myself) and block the iTunes app to prevent these annoying subversive ads from hijacking my browser on my iPad.

I'd like to see a policy of 1 warning then a ban for ad publishers who use these underhanded methods.

The best thing to do is to build relationships with 5-9 high quality ad platforms and waterfall them through passback tags, one to the other.

Good platforms include, but are certainly not limited to:

AOL x+1 AppNexus Turn MediaMath AudienceScience Criteo The Trade Desk

If you're lucky, you can satisfy all requests without sending a single impression over to AdSense.

If your domain is delivering fewer than 100m impressions monthly, it's unlikely that the companies noted above will be keen to put personnel on your account, and may not be able to work with you at all.

However, with intelligent switching, keen arbitrage, and an aggressive performant waterfall (e.g., you never actually want to pass a request to more than two or three of these or you'll see packet loss that exceeds the positive delta you'd have obtained by accessing yet another ad platform) you can do very well without using AdSense. The company I mentioned below, Publir, was cofounded by me about five years ago and does what we think is a rather good job of this. Sites like The Atlantic and others use us for their ads.

We're also terrific fans of BuySellAds, whose self-serve platform is second to none. There, your goal is simply to do direct outreach to advertisers likely to covet your audience. Even the finest brand-name publishers only sell about 30% of their ads this way, though, so your expectations ought not be too high.

It's more work, but you can generate similar levels of income - or sometimes more - using affiliate programs from sites like Commission Junction, ShareASale, and Clickbank. You'll need to test and optimise, but the rewards can be considerable.

My email is tom at buysellads.com

In short, they are pro-user and generally seem like good guys, and they give us a lot of control.

media.net, my previous company. We used to consider ourself in competition with adsense. They have some big name customers like forbes, cosmopolitan etc.

Particularly for a tutorial site I would consider paid, clearly marked sponsored tutorials that you produce and keep full editorial control over. In moderation it can work well and still have educational value for readers and drive results for advertisers way beyond any display ads, and significantly more revenue for you. Full disclosure I handle direct ad sales for publishers with this exact same model at TechCrowds.com (including representing a few BuySellAds publishers)

But if it's not too irrelevant to that topic, I suggest combining whatever ad network you have with Amazon affiliate links. It helped me double my Adsense income for the same traffic.

Ultimately, if you have some quality service or content that you can sell, membership/subscription model is the best. I know someone who just gave up on Adsense, and was making 10x the Adsense revenue from subscriptions.

The best ads for publishers and users are ones that are relevant. If you want to display something that is irrelevant to the user and ineffective for the advertiser, you might as well not display ads at all and avoid annoying your users.

The only problem I would see with that is that if a user already converted by clicking the ad, he would continue to see the same ad when he is on your site again. You're no longer able to extract more $ from that user.

Its a hit and miss though. Nothing like what I was earning with AdSense.

However we focus a French public for the moment. But we try to do not track visitors of our publishers.

p.s. The landing page makes me confused on exactly what it is that your site does.

It looks promising.