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Originally Posted by ohaithar
I help run a gaming website and I was wondering which ad revenue service we should sign up with given how many hits we get per month. I've heard that Google Adsense's rates are horrible, but I personally don't know anything about this kind of thing.
In a span of 10 days (we just installed tracking analysis software), we got 6k unique visitors, 240k pages, 775k hits (can't tell between pages and hits myself), and we use around 8GB of bandwidth. Assuming we get, say, 10k unique visitors a month, what would be our best bet? We want ads that give you revenue without having to click on them, and we don't want them to be intrusive, for a lack of better word.
Hey, I run a gaming site as well with 35-45k uniques/month and have been experimenting a lot with ad networks the last couple of months.
I have tried CPMStar, EpicGameAds, eGameAds, ad2games and IQU so far. All of them are gaming related ad networks, some are a CPC/CPM mix and the rest CPA. The result was that for standard IAB banners (we tested 728x90, 468x60, 300x250) these networks are far worse than adsense.
We are still using EpicGameAds though for a pop-under which has a ~3.70$ cpm for us (eu/us traffic mix). That pop-under alone generates twice the income of 3 adsense units combined with the dimensions mentioned above.
There are other alternatives/additions to adsense that I am currently testing, one of them is video advertising. If you are partnered up or have revenue sharing with youtube or any other video network you can embed a video and autoplay it on your site. The same concept works with a live stream, just have the stream running 24/7 and embed it. Or you can have your own player (flowplayer, JW FLV player) embedded, but for that you need an ad stream ofc (Intergi might be an option for this purpose). Video ads should crush any 300x250 or similar sized banner with ease in regards to profitability.
Generally there are 2 issues with video ads tho; 1. annoying sound and 2. loading times. The first can be solved with auto-mute (hard to do with youtube), the 2nd one is unsolvable but in todays world not a big concern because most people have good internet (especially people visiting gaming sites).
The other alternative are places such as BuySellAds. It is possible to sell ad spaces there for a really good CPM, but sadly its not as attractive as it initially looks. The problem is that you have to disable any adverts in the ad spaces that you are offering, they generally seem to not approve any websites with untargeted ads active and the competition is huge so you might never sell anything. Also, 50,000 page impressions per month is a requirement. I'm still looking for alternative sites that offer the same as buysellads without the downsides that they have but no success so far.
Depending on your website you could give CPA a shot tho. There are gaming sites which are specifically built for the CPA model. One example: xmmorpg dot com... this site reviews games and puts a big "play now" area in the review with their affiliate link. I would recommend IQU for a gaming CPA ad network. You could also browse Offervault, maybe you find something suitable there.