LooseSuits

I entirely agree with your traffic comment. Adsense can be "relevant" to my readers but most people are immune to it.

TLA is nice because it's a defined level of income (still dependent on traffic and stats).

Personally, my favorite monetization is reviews. Lots of people have issues with them but I always remain impartial. My style, though, is to write and review technologies that I think are useful to my readers. These reviews end up doing a greater service for the advertisers, my readers, and of course, myself...

I covered this in a recent article:

http://www.seopher.com/articles/cpc_cpm_or_flat_rate_which_is_best

Nice analysis...

I'm wasn't a big fan of TextLinkAds at first... but now I'm sold! The steady income for some of the small to medium size blogs is much better than relying on clicks and traffic.

I would definitely prefer to use Text Link Ads rather than AdSense, but they won't accept me yet as my blog doesn't get enough track or have enough links I guess :( I'll just have to keep writing!

I've got a medium sized blog and I've had a TLA account for 6 months.

Not ONE ad pops up in my account... ever.

What gives??

What do you think about textlinkbrokers.com is it a good site?

Its not just traffic with adsense it depends on your niche, you can make good money with lower traffic if your site brings up higher paying ads because of its content. Something like a digital camera blog will probably mean the ads pay well where as off topic blogs or niches like my film blog the adsense does not pay well. Text-Link-Ads have sold 8 links on my blog which pays my hosting costs so I am pretty pleased with them. They have even sold one on my low traffic personal blog, they are a great company IMO and the links take up so little valuable virtual real estate.

szczupak, I signed up for a textlinkbrokers account and haven't sold any in a month. My TLA account has been sold out for months now and I have recently started another section of them and have already sold 4 in about 3 weeks here. TLA has been good to me.

I recently wrote about the pros and cons of each (text links versus contextual ads) here: 'http://www.all-about-content.com/2007/02/google-adsense-versus-text-link-ads.html'

I find contextual ads to be of low quality and not appealing to the type of people who visit my blog. The big bummer though is that the TLA script doesn't work on old custom Blogger templates (see: 'http://www.all-about-content.com/2007/02/text-link-adscom-script-doesnt-work-on.html')

The way I've always understood it was that TLA is better suited for small to medium sized blogs whereas AdSense can be very profitable for large blogs with high traffic volumes.

TLA has had great reviews.. I'm yet to play with it :(

Anyone can use Adsense. If you're not getting a good amount of traffic and writing for a niche, you can forget TLA.

I get reasonable traffic (more than some blogs I've seen with TLA) but haven't had a single TLA ad pop up in over 6 months. Them's the breaks, I guess.

I've stopped using ads altogether now, so it's moot. Just thought I'd weigh in.

@Devin: what are these reviews you speak of? You get paid to review websites and such? Or is this a service one signs up for?

@rick: Reviewme.com and payperpost.com are two examples. Of the two, the blogging world seems to like reviewme better.

I still don't see how this is a versus argument when both can be used side-by-side along with paid reviews.

I started out with TLA, but earning $8.66 a month wasn't doing it for me. Plus, the ads were about ridiculous things (cold heat soldering iron! payday loans!), so when I was contacted by LinkExperts, I decided to give LE a trial run.

I'm glad I did. I'm finally running somewhat relevant ads (about food, kitchenwares, take-out services) and doing better monetarily speaking too.

Yes, this sounds like an ad for LinkExperts, but my experience since February has been pretty great. The folks are responsive and they actually do some work, rather than just offering your site along with thousands of others.

I haven't profited from either, but unfortunately my traffic isn't exactly at revenue-producing caliber.

I always found it kinda funny that the ad on 9rules for Text Link Ads is an image, seems kind of self-defeating.

My ranking of internet ad providers:

Year Round Advertising:

TLA > Linkworth > Yahoo Publisher > Google Adsense > Blogads

Seasonal and Focused One-Off Advertising"

Azoogle > ReviewMe > Amazon Referral

Year Round Advertising

My biggest problem with TLA as a long term advertiser, is that once you have sold your inventory, you are stuck. You cannot set your own prices, you cannot remove advertisers (you have to appeal to TLA and they do not like to do it), and you cannot ad Text Link inventory beyond 10. Thus demand has all the power over supply.

Take this example:

If TLA's pricing algorithm decides your inventory is worth $20 per month, and you then sell out the max numbers of Text Links (10), and your site continues to grow, you will forever be locked in at 10 links at $20 per link because the advertisers who would buy a link on your site at $20 will maintain it as long as you keep growing since you are a better and better relative value. You cannot price them to the market value of a text link on your site ever again. However, if you were to stop growing, or to shrink, they will eventually drop you. To top if off, you only see 50% of that $20. It's a dysfunctional market.

We ran into a situation where we had sold out all 10 slots for our text links ads, most at rates which were very very low, and our revenue from TLA was capped despite the fact traffic been growing 20%+ per month. We contacted TLA and asked them to manually chop us down to 1 text link ad; after an email back and forth with them in which they insisted no publisher other than us had ever had a problem with the fact that you can't control the price, can't have more than 10 text link ads and can't remove or reprice advertisers ever, we were brought down to 1 link. I understand their position and appreciate it, for them the focus has to be on attracting advertisers not supporting publisher rights. I just like having some rights.

But TLA is the best for blogs with traffic medium levels of traffic because they sell your inventory the best, in my experience and for medium levels of traffic text link ads are the stickiest form of recurring revenue.

Linkworth provides text link ads as well, and we have had reasonable success with them, but they clearly do not have nearly the critical mass of paying advertisers as TLA. And their site is a trainwreck. They allow you to set your own prices and remove advertisers.

Yahoo's CPC Ads have worked far better for us than AdSense. I do not know why, they seem slightly less relevant than Adsense but tend to pay out much much higher per click. We rotate them periodically just to see if one service has improved or not.

Adsense has the most relevant ads but we just get ridiculously low revenue per click. We're a finance site and our revenue per a click with them has at times been under $0.20.

BlogAds is dying as far as I can tell. Considering how fast blogs and web advertising is growing, you would think they would be doing gangbusters businesses, but in my own experience and in the sites I read regularly, I see a fraction of the blogads I used to see. A good example is Marginal Revolution -- I had never seen them with less than 5 blogads before a few months ago. Now they are down to 1 and their pricing is relatively cheap at <$1 CPM in effect. Now you look at BlogAds traffic chart and you start to wonder. It's traffic is at early 2005 levels when it should be doing gangbusters.

A quick trip to their site and I think you get to the core problem. It's a joke. It's unintuitive in its design. The order a la carte functionality is beyond unwieldy; you have to wait for it to load (I have had it take close to 1 minute), the scroll bar does function correctly in IE, you can only look at 3 different prospective sites at a time (amongst hundreds and hundreds potential sites) and it's all featured in a narrowly constrained box within the site for no reason. It's just terrible UI and Web 2.0 feel without Web 2.0 functionality. And as far as I can tell, they think it's the bee's knees.

And to display the ads on your site, you basically have a permanent marker on your site which is ungainly when ads are not filled.

Seasonal or Focused One-Off Ads

Azoogle can work very well for certain types of targeted traffic and around the holidays, so if our site was aligned a different way, I could envision making a killing with it. We made a couple hundred from them near V-Day.

Amazon Referral is good if you have something in a post that is clearly being made interesting in the post to the reader. Or in a buying guide type piece like this one we did for Christmas to "improve efficiency". Those long lists of books people have read that line some people's sites -- we found those to be a complete waste of real estate and just clutter. In our experience, they don't generate enough money to be worth the clutter.

ReviewMe is ok if you are ok selling out (even if you don't have to write something positive, just being paid to write something is biasing) and ok using your site space to talk about something that may not be 100% appropriate for your target audience and may be uninteresting. They are also very irregular. That being said, we have no shame so we have enjoyed the wealth of riches they send our way every few months.

In the past we have used a couple other ad platforms and were underwhelmed. Those include Kanoodle, Indeed (job advertising) and Pheedo. They may not suck now, but they were a waste of time when we tried them.

We also provide commentary on each quarter of results we get Long or Short's Q2'07 Results, so if you are curious what kind of monetization a site with 600-700 visits per day last quarter got, here it is laid out.

What I don't like about LinkExperts is that they require exclusivity. AFAIK, TLA and TLB let you run paid text links from competing brokers. LinkExperts says you can run contextual ads but no other text ads. So if you already have some revenue, but want more, you can't just sign up... you'd need to gamble that switching will result in more ads.

I like both. And I also like LinkWorth because it works for me recently. One thing we need to consider Private Ads sale that it much better all of the above services.