An advertising network delivers ads to multiple websites based on content or user preferences. Site owners must sign up and be approved, and can choose to sell ad space outright or based on clicks. Some readers feel ads take away from a website’s legitimacy, and smaller sites may find more profit selling ads directly. Large networks may offer poor returns for smaller sites due to hostile payment policies.
An advertising network is a business that provides advertising to more than one website. Typically, advertising networks deliver advertising content or manage advertising space on a website based on the site’s content or the preferences of the user visiting the site. Sometimes, ad networks serve ads to publishers, who then choose which advertisers and content to place on their websites. Ad serving sites typically track advertising activity on a website and pay the site owner electronically or by check when a certain payment threshold has been reached.
To get started with an ad network, webmasters must first sign up to participate. Often, the ad network approves or denies the website’s membership in the ad network based on the website’s content. Content that can block a website from accessing an advertising network may include adult content, gambling content, or hate speech. Once the site has been approved, the site owner, often a webmaster, chooses the advertising content and publishes the content on the website. Advertising images on a site can be purchased outright for a monthly fee based on space, or site owners can pay based on how many people visit the site and click on the ads.
While an ad network can be a decent way for a website owner or blogger to make money from content creation, some readers feel that advertising takes away the legitimacy of a website’s opinion. For this reason, the owner of a website must ensure that an ad network pays for its space or removes advertising from the website. Popular ad networks include Google Adsense®, Chitika, and Adbrite®. For smaller websites that have a library of reasonably popular niche content, selling web advertising directly to advertisers can often prove more profitable than choosing ads served by an advertising network.
Large ad networks offer many choices in advertisers and advertising payment terms, but larger networks may offer poor returns for smaller sites and blogs. While they can prove profitable on some larger sites, many of the huge advertising networks, such as Commission Junction, effectively discourage the use of their advertising service on less active websites by maintaining payment policies that are hostile to smaller, slower earning websites . Such policies can include unattainable high payout levels and the imposition of penalties that drain a publisher’s advertising account of earned commissions if the advertising account does not produce sales frequently enough. This may mean that the owner of a slow traffic website may make some paper fees from sales within the system, but if the sales don’t come in quickly enough, a large advertising network may choose to withdraw the money before the webmaster reaches the payment threshold.
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