The most famous Pay Per Click advertiser is Google Adsense, but there is many others and all have pros and cons. Most publishers care about the bottom line: how much money can each one make. In this article I will be ranking in order the most common PPC networks by how profitable they are for webmasters and bloggers.

Google Adsense: Google adsense is the most popular and has the most advertisers. Therefore their keyword bids are usually the most profitable for web publishers. Their contextual ad system is also highly targeted, so click through rate is good. Google Adsense is pretty strict on click fraud, which can often wind up hurting innocent webmasters. Therefore, we recommend you not solely monetize your site on Google Adsense alone.
 
 

Yahoo Publisher Network: Yahoo Publisher pays almost as good as Google Adsense per click on average, but it has poorer contextual targeting than Adsense because they have a smaller advertiser base. The poor targeting, usually results in lower click through rate and lower earnings overall.

Unfortunately, YPN has been in beta forever and it is hard to get and stay in the program. Yahoo wants quality sites in their network for now while it’s still in beta. They have strict standards for staying in their program based on the quality of traffic you get.

According to YPN the standards for staying in good standing with them is based on:

1. Suspicious click activity.
2. Advertiser conversion rates.
3. Overall quality of leads generated on your site.

YPN is only open to U.S citizens while it is currently in beta.
 
 

Bidvertiser: Bidvertiser, based on my experience, seems to be one of the better paying PPC advertising networks out there. It’s not as good as Adsense or Yahoo, but they usually pay better per click on average than most of the rest of the PPC networks. Therefore, I recommend Bidvertiser for those who can’t use YPN and Adsense.

They are not contextual advertising, but instead they give you “generic” PPC ads based on the category you picked to describe your website. Then once your website is approved by them, advertisers will start bidding on your site for PPC ads beyond these “generic ads”. Supposedly, this bidding will increase your revenue.

I have only used it for 3 months, so I can’t tell you for certain if in fact, it does increase profits in the long run. I didn’t notice that. The one major con of bidvertiser is that it is not contextual ads, so click through rate won’t be as good as Adsense or YPN because the ads won’t be as targeted to the page content. It also doesn’t have as good of a click payout rate as Adsense or YPN. Don’t expect Bidvertiser to be as profitable as Yahoo Publisher Network or Adsense, but its a worthy alternative if you can’t get into the others for whatever reason. To help improve click rate, you can pick and choose which ads you want displayed, once 3rd parties start to bid ads on your site.

Signup for Bidvertiser
 
 

RevenuePilot: This is another non-contextual PPC network. You get to choose your own keywords for each ad. By keeping on top of checking the current keyword bid prices ( they are the only ones that I know of that show this info), you can get fairly decent pay per click rates.

The big problem with RevenuePilot is the click through rate and lack of advertisers. On a large header banner there will only be one advertiser that fills up the ad, often not even targeted that well for the keyword you picked. I ran revenuepilot on my site for a month and was dissapointed by the click rate. I sometimes would sometimes go well over a thousand impressions straight, before getting just one click. RevenuePilot also does not count clicks from countries outside of U.S, U.K, Canada, Australia making the click rate even worse.

Signup for RevenuePilot
 
 

Kontera: This is different from the previous networks mentioned in this article. Kontera is “inline text” contextual advertising. It will put a double underlined link under some of the words in your content. It will look very similiar to a regular link. If someone hovers a mouse over it, a little contextual ad popup will show.

Earnings are reported on the low end, like most alternative PPC networks. While Google now allows Kontera, if you are running Google adsense, there is no reason to use Kontera simultaneously. You would just be having users click on much lower paying ads instead, which obviously you don’t want. Plus, I think having ad links inside your content, is kind of trashy looking anyways. I’m not a big fan of the idea of inline text ads like Kontera, so I put Kontera towards the bottom of my recommendations.

Signup for Kontera
 
 

ShoppingAds: This is an image based PPC network where they show the best prices on specific products. Users are paid per click or per action, depending on the country and their membership level. We haven’t tried this program ourselves, but users seem to report fairly low earnings.

Signup for ShoppingAds
 
 

Adbrite: I used adbrite for 6 months. I didn’t know any better at the time because it was my first PPC network and I heard the horror stories about Google Adsense. My opinion is they are probably the worst paying PPC network out of the entire internet. Their pay per click rates are absolutely pathetic. They have direct advertising purchasing options, but those are rare to get, and they don’t usually pay that great either. They also don’t seem to care about keeping a strict measure against click fraud and junk traffic, making them terrible for even potential advertisers too.

Signup for Adbrite
 
 

Other PPC networks: Most of the others have either very high requirements in traffic, or aren’t any more profitable than some of the PPC advertisers already mentioned.