Web Advertising Networks | Top 20 Monetization Platforms

Generally, Web Advertising Networks also known as Web Ad Networks are companies that connect advertisers to websites that want to host advertisements. Whereby, the key function of Web Advertising Networks is to aggregate ads supply from publishers and then match them with the on-demand advertisers.

The phrase “ad network” by itself is media-neutral in the sense that there can be a “Television Ad Network” or a “Print Ad Network.” But is increasingly used to mean “online ad network” as the effect of aggregation of publisher ad space and selling to advertisers is most commonly seen in the online space.

The fundamental difference between traditional media ad networks and online ad networks is that; online ad networks use a central ad server to deliver advertisements to consumers. This enables targeting, tracking, and reporting of impressions in ways not possible with analog media alternatives. Before learning more about Web Advertising Networks let’s look at Monetization.

What Is Monetization? 

Almost all Web Advertising Networks offer some type of Content Monetization. Hereby, you can not talk about them and then fail to mention monetization. But, most beginner web publishers don’t even know what it is or even how it works. In simple terms, it’s just another form of native display advertising.

From this point of view, your website and blog monetization is both an effort-asking and timed capacity-related process. And unless you have an internal or externally set of a competent online team working behind the scenes, you’ll fail. Not only, without monetization, how else will you make money?

Of course, there are so many ways to make money on a website like an affiliate marketing strategy. But, monetization is a bit different. By definition, Monetization means making an asset profitable. This term has become quite popular in recent years and often refers to digital assets.

Case Study: Advertising Explained | Top 10 Best Simplified Advertising Methods

Such content can include software, digital media, or files. With the proliferation of online media and digital assets, this has become a popular concept. Especially among website owners, software developers, and other digital content providers. That said, you can read and learn more about how monetization works in detail.

What Are Web Advertising Networks?

Now that you have an idea of what monetization is, we can comfortably look into web advertising networks. It’s important to realize, that the web advertising networks market is a large and growing market. Moreover, Internet advertising revenues expected to grow from $135.42 bn in 2014 to $239.87 bn in 2019.

Digital advertising revenues in the United States alone are set to double in 2019 from $107.30 bn in 2018. This growth will result in many new players in the market and encourage the acquisition of ad networks by larger companies. Particularly that either enter the market or expand their market presence.

From the illustration above, you can easily see how ads are called by these networks. Currently, there are hundreds of web advertising networks worldwide, and the landscape keeps changing daily. A good example of web advertising networks is the Google AdSense Monetization Program.

Whenever someone talks about monetization, invariably, the first thing that pops up in the mind is Google AdSense. And while there’s nothing particularly wrong with that — it is, after all, the world’s largest ad network. But, to sit on an assumption that AdSense can’t be outdone by other ad networks isn’t wise.

Get Started: Google AdSense – Earn Money From Website Monetization

If you are considering monetizing your website or blog, then don’t just sit there and wait. Do the right thing, make sure your site abides by the network’s set guidelines and has quality content. Even if your application is rejected, don’t give up and keep trying.

Give yourself some time, and all will be well. Also if you would like us to assist you in monetizing your website or blog, please feel free to write to us.

Types of Web Advertising Networks

As of today, the ad tech industry is highly disruptive and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Google has competitors who give them a good run for their money. In reality, it may take a lot of hits and trials to figure out which ad network to use.

Or even a combination of ad networks that generates the highest revenue for you. But when you finally do figure it out — it would’ve been well worth the effort. Uniquely, getting approved as a publisher of the best web advertising platform is a thorough process.

Fortunately, websites with a clean interface, more traffic, and engagements are preferably selected as ad network publishers by the advertising platforms. Whereby, they’ll get direct access to advertising campaigns from premium ad networks. As well as demand-side platforms, and ad agencies within a single interface.

With unlimited access to demand partners, Ad publishers can get the most of their inventory in a highly competitive programmatic environment. Expose your inventory to thousands of global advertisers and yield profits on your terms. In particular, there’re several criteria for categorizing web advertising networks though.

Such criteria include:

• overall company’s business strategy,
• the quality of the networks’ traffic,
• considerably, the volume of inventory that ads can serve, etc.

On one hand, large publishers often sell only their remnant inventory through ad networks. Typical numbers range from 10% to 60% of total inventory being remnant and sold through advertising networks. On the other hand, smaller publishers often sell all of their inventory through ad networks.

One type of ad network is known as a blind network. It works in such a way that advertisers place ads, but do not know the exact places where their ads are being placed. Equally important, large ad networks include a mixture of search engines, media companies, and technology vendors.

Category ad networks include:

1. Business Strategy-Based
2. Clients Traffic-Based
3. Mobile & Video-Based
4. Custom Online Publishers

For beginner webmasters, there are general terms and conditions that guide almost all web advertising networks. For instance, some networks demand very strict terms and conditions adherence. While there are other ad publishing alternatives that are based on commissions.

Sometimes, commissions vary on what sells most. Otherwise, users still earn a good commission when they match the criteria. Not to mention, the publisher is also allowed to display and share as provided by the platform to earn good revenue. Let’s now evaluate ad networks by category:

Business Strategy-Based Web Advertising Networks 

In general, business strategy-based web advertising networks are divided into three groups that include;

1. Vertical networks: They represent the publications in their portfolio, with full transparency for the advertiser about where their ads will run. They typically promote high-quality traffic at market prices and are heavily used by brand marketers. The economic model is generally revenue share. Vertical Networks offer ROS (Run-Of-Site) advertising across specific Channels (example: Auto or Travel) or they offer site-wide advertising options, in which case they operate in a similar fashion to Publisher Representation firms.
2. Blind networks: These companies offer good pricing to direct marketers in exchange for those marketers relinquishing control over where their ads will run, though some networks offer a “site opt-out” method. The network usually runs campaigns as RON or Run-Of-Network. Blind networks achieve their low pricing through large bulk buys of typically remnant inventory combined with conversion optimization and ad targeting technology.
3. Targeted networks: Sometimes called “next generation” or “2.0” ad networks, these focus on specific targeting technologies such as behavioral or contextual, that have been built into an ad server. Targeted networks specialize in using consumer clickstream data to enhance the value of the inventory they purchase. Further specialized targeted networks include social graph technologies that attempt to enhance the value of inventory using connections in social networks.

Client Traffic-Based Web Advertising Networks 

By the same token, web advertising networks are also divided further into two. First, there are first-tier advertising networks. With a large number of their own advertisers and publishers.

They also have high-quality traffic, and they serve ads and traffic to second-tier networks. Examples of first-tier networks include the major search engines. Secondly, there are second-tier advertising networks. Some with their own advertisers and publishers too.

But, their main source of revenue comes from syndicating ads from other advertising networks. Oftentimes, websites are categorized into tiers too. But, this may be misleading! For example, Google is in the clear majority of networks offering advertisements based on impressions served.

Other networks that could be labeled as tier 2 actually dominate over these tier 1 ad networks. More so, as far as the number of customers is reached.

Mobile & Video-Based Web Advertising Networks

Ad networks often support a wide spectrum of ad formats (e.g. banners, native ads) and platforms (e.g. display, mobile, video). This is true for most ad networks. However, there also are ad networks that focus on particular kinds of inventory and ads.

In this case, consider tools like Mobile ad networks (aka Mobi ad networks) or Video ad networks as well. Mostly, mobile ad networks focus on the traffic generated through mobile web and mobile apps. And then they work with the corresponding ad formats. While video ad networks serve ads via inventory, associated with online video content.

Custom Online Publishers Web Advertising Networks

Most online ad-network platforms offer website owners and marketers to signup as advertising publishers. Publishers can then display ads shared by the advertising network and the revenue is shared between both the advertising network and publisher.

When the beginners could not pass through the minimum criteria for publishing advertisements, ad placement services could ban the publisher for not fulfilling the requirements. Below is a list of some Ad networks you could seek.

1. Google AdSense

Notably, Google AdSense is among the world’s leading and greatest web advertising networks. But, the approval rates for AdSense are quite strict. However, you only have to conform to their standards and policies, quality content for your blog or website and have good traffic. Below are some of the key ads that are available at AdSense:

1.1. AdSense for Content

The targeting is either based on clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM). Although there is no noticeable variation between the CPM and CPC, the CPM are quite familiar. In this category, the ads come in various sizes ranging from text, image, animated image, video, or flash.

When the ad sizes are more, the users can choose whether to show multimedia and text ads simultaneously or can decide to choose only one. For easy identification, a grey arrow appears underneath AdSense text ads.

 1.2. Page-Level Ads

These are a family of ad layouts that offer a fresh and inventive technique for you to monetize your website or blog. When using Page-level ads, one places the same section of ad code once on every page that you would wish to display the ads.

 1.3. AdSense for Search

These ads allow a publisher to show ads linking to the items on search, on their site, and obtain 51% of the income created from those ads. AdSense search ads are shown either beside the outcomes from an AdSense Search Engine or combined with inner search fallouts through the applications of Custom Search Ads.

Custom Search Ads are singly accessible to white-registered publishers. Even though the revenue bit from AdSense for Search (51%) is less than from AdSense for Content (68%), more revenue can be attained due to the probability of higher Click-through Rates.

 1.4. AdSense for video

AdSense for video lets publishers have quality video content to make revenue via ad placements from Google’s widespread advertising system. The publisher is in a position to make a decision about what sort of ads are displayed alongside their video inventory.

1.5. AdSense for mobile content

These permit publishers to create income from their mobile websites/ blogs by means of targeted Google ads. Google compares advertisements to the content on the mobile website.

2. Facebook Audience Network Ads

With more than 1 billion worldwide users and millions of advertisers, Facebook also has a formidable display network known as the Facebook Audience Network. They don’t deal with an adult or explicit material, and they help some of the biggest brands in the country get the results they want.

Facebook also serves ads throughout a wide network of apps and non-website media as well. Overall, it’s an excellent way for you to reach out to potential customers using Facebook’s extensive cache of user data. Plus, if you already advertise on Facebook, the transition to using their Audience Network should be fairly simple.

You follow similar guidelines to Facebook’s ads already — you just have to modify the sizes to fit the specifications of the ad medium you want to use. With that, Facebook is straightforward, easy to use, and intuitive enough for an advertiser to see results.

3. Apple Advertising

Apple Advertising is one of the leading mobile display advertisers. This is partly because Apple controls the world’s largest app store. Meaning they can make it easy for their developers to make money by including ads. That simple system allows developers to make money.

It also allows you to consistently reach new customers who might’ve never heard of your website. In addition to that, Apple has an intuitive bidding and targeting system called Apple Search Ads. That allows advertisers to pick and choose how they want their ads to appear.

4. Yahoo Ads Network

Yahoo! may not be as popular as it once was as a search engine, but it still has a robust display network that reaches millions of users every month. As of today, the Yahoo Ads Network is still vibrant in the advertising market too. Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Services, Inc. under Yahoo Gemini.

In addition, it also has a targeting system that gauges potential customers by geography and age, among a wide variety of other demographic factors. The search engine may not be as big as Google, but it’s still an affordable and viable option for reaching new customers.

5. AdPushup Advertising Networks

Are you looking to bump up your ad earnings this year? The AdPushup SSP tag will instantly connect you to hundreds of premium ad networks and exchanges. Just select the ad units you want to run, generate the ad codes, and they’ll start serving ads from the best brands, advertisers, and campaigns on your website.

They have partnered with top-tier ad networks and exchanges. Including Google AdX, AppNexus, Rubicon, and Criteo among others, and are making this premium demand accessible to publishers who value quick integration and high performance.

These demand partnerships also allow AdPushup to offer access to newer ad formats such as sticky ads in addition to the standard IAB display units. Together with their existing revenue optimization stack, these changes will help them fuel the next level of revenue growth for their publishing partners.

While also, making it easier for new customers to get on board. They are currently in a closed beta for their new self-service SSP, please sign up here to request access.

6. Undertone 

Undertone specializes in providing several high-impact ad formats in addition to standard IAB—including IAB rising stars, several video formats, and its own range of flagship display formats designed for higher user engagement.

This coupled with the fact that many of Undertone’s proprietary ad units use your ad inventory in non-traditional ways, ensuring there’s no cannibalization of existing ad products, means that Undertone can offer CPMs 100%-1500% higher than traditional display ads.

7. Infolinks Advertising Networks

This is an online advertising platform for both publishers and advertisers, as well as brands. Infolinks can be used together with other ad networks like Google AdSense. The Infolinks products are InFrame, InScreen, InFold, InTag, InArticle, and in-text, which are aimed at enabling publishers to generate fresh revenue sources from their sites.

Additionally, Infolinks produces great monthly income for over 200,000 publishers in more than 130 nations currently, and they work together with some of the renowned advertisers in the world like Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and eBay.

Their platform is very modest to assimilate into your site and is usually available to any publisher. It has an advantage in that it has no setup fee requirement and no least requirements for page visits or views. For the small advertisers, Infolinks too offers a self-serve advertising stage called AdShop.

8. Adblade Advertising Networks

Adblade is one of the utmost brand-safe media ventures in the US, with a topmost score of 188 from autonomous dimension firm AdSafe Media- the frontrunner in rating online content. Moreover, Adblade is a strong worldwide Digital Media Optimization Platform that creates over 4 million verdicts per hour.

In addition, the Adblade Network also offers the utmost effective Media Optimization Services obtainable currently for publishers and advertisers together. The Platform permits top publishers to yield significant and unrelenting industry foremost income.

In that case, permitting advertisers entrance to the best, brand-safe portfolio generating above-average ROI. Adblade has advertising engagements primarily with greatly trafficked content suppliers. Great websites within its network include NASDAQ, Hearst, The Washington Times, ABC News, and Chicago Sun-Times.

9. Media.net

Media.net is one of the largest substitutes for AdSense. This system features mainly contextual ads that operate in a somewhat dissimilar way to typical display ad units.

Although incorporated within traditional sizes like 728×90 and 300×250, these ads frequently portray numerous connected keywords. Clicking on a keyword, however, does NOT create any income for the publisher, rather it shows an additional screen revealing appropriate ads.

In other words, Media.net ads operate just in the same manner as AdSense link units. Since Media.net shows principally contextual ads, there are a few important things I would wish to share. Especially, that you will be required to be aware of. It takes some time for the ads to adjust to your site.

The ads first analyze the content displayed on your site, then display keywords that are supposed to be significant to the adjoining content. As the section magnitude develops, an algorithm governs which keywords produce the maximum amount of clicks. As well as revenue for the specific audience.

10. RevenueHits

RevenueHits uses contextual and geo-targeted ad serving technology – which makes it a really favorable choice in the time of GDPR – to monetize websites, mobile sites, add-ons, widgets, toolbar, and many more.

It serves over two billion ad impressions each day. With a promise of a 100% fill rate across all geographic regions. Other than display ads, Revenue Hits also lets publishers monetize their websites. Using text ads, pop-ups, apps, widgets, XML feeds, and other custom formats.

11. PropellerAds

The PropellerAds network is purposed to making digital advertising effective and reliable. With worldwide reach through the web and mobile networks, Propeller Ads offers publishers the capacity to monetize their traffic.

And also provides advertisers permit to a big number of ad placements on premium locations of several categories. They offer a flexible and honest trying model that conveys actual market worth to both publishers and advertisers.

Important to realize, their platforms are android, IOS, and mobile Web. And the types of the network include the mobile ad network, and the mobile ad server, with CPA, CPI, CPL, and CPM. Whereas, they display banners, custom, interstitial, notifications, popunder, and video.

The payment thresholds are as follows:

PayPal – Minimum $10

Western Union – Minimum $100

Check – Minimum $100

Wire Transfer – Minimum $10

12. Chitika & Adcash Advertising Networks

Chitika prides itself on being one of the largest in the list of advertising networks, of course after AdSense. As of date, it has registered more than 350,000 publishers across the globe, serving over four billion ads each month. The approval procedure for fresh publishers is typically pretty up-front and takes less time.

13. Bidvertiser

Bidvertiser is an ad network with an interesting monetization model. Especially when the click leads to conversion (i.e. sale) for the advertiser. Not to mention, BidVertiser supports multiple ad formats including banners, skyscrapers, rectangles, and mobile. You can use the provided point-and-click tool to customize the layout of these units to match your website’s look.

A bidding system ensures that publishers always get the highest possible revenue from each unit. Using the reporting interface, you can easily monitor your ads performance, clicks, click-through rate, and the total amount you’ve earned.

14. Conversant Media

Conversant Media holds campaigns for more than 5,000 brands every single month. Cumulating the likelihood of finding the best fit for all contents. An actual publisher border offers a completely transparent campaign displaying alongside action and revenue data.

However, their cross-platform promotion solutions guarantee that publishers are in a position to maximize their incomes direct from mobile devices. Conversant offers ads in several formats like in-text rollovers, static, rich media, banners, over the page, and much more. This is in addition to the standard display.

15. BuySellAds

BuySellAds is another great way for websites and blogs to get some good money. In other words, it is a platform for publishers and advertisers to purchase and sell ads. Of importance to NOTE is that buysellads.com does NOT approve blogs with the domain of blogspot.com.

For you to be an approved publishing member, you must have an audience viewership of 150,000 per month.

16. Advertising.com

Verizon Media aka Advertising.com is also among the top advertising networks great for monetizing websites and blogs. It has associations with more than 70 of comScore’s Best 100 ad-supported sites. Particularly with a network of publishers traversing 30+ website content verticals.

And also, monetizes an average of close to 2 billion ad impressions per day. Advertising.com gives ad blocks by advertiser, media, industry, and category to certify the finest fit for your website or blog. You should prioritize this network if the majority of your page visitors emanate from the UK, US, and Canada.

As of today, Verizon Media Native is a keyword-based “Pay per click” or “Sponsored search” Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo. Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Services, Inc.

17. Amazon Associates

Amazon Associates is the affiliate marketing program offered by the world’s largest online retailer. Web publishers who sign up for the program (no minimum traffic requirement) can display ads on their sites.

In particular, custom banner ads and text links point to Amazon categories or product pages. The publisher then receives a commission from each click-through that results in a sale. Amazon has one of the largest affiliate networks on the Internet.

Boasting over 1.6 million sellers and countless products. While their commission rate is on the low side (Starting at 4%, going up to 8.5%), publishers get a cut of everything. Whenever a shopper buys during the first purchase.

18. AdMob Advertising Networks

AdMob is a mobile application monetization network that was acquired by Google in 2010. Mobile app developers can log in to AdMob and create text or image ads for display in their mobile applications. Inasmuch as the same way a web publisher would create a new ad unit for a website or blog.

Color combinations, size, and other such options are all customizable. Once the ad unit has been created, the developer is provided with an SDK file. In particular, that can be incorporated into the app. The ad units work perfectly on all Android, iOS, and Windows platforms.

19. Vibrant Media

Vibrant Media is an ad network that offers Better-Ads and Chrome filter-friendly ad formats. Such as in-text, in-image, lightbox, storyboard, mosaic, and brand canvas. In addition to the standard IAB display ad units.

Depending on your needs, you can choose to use Vibrant Media as your primary display ad network. Alternatively, you can employ their native ad solutions to increase revenue. Not to mention, without changing your existing ad configuration.

20. Clicksor

Clicksor is yet another great online Internet marketing service. It serves over 900 million ad impressions on over 100,000 specialized websites on its publishers’ network. In addition to regular banner ads, Clicksor also offers in-text ads, rich media, interstitials, and pop-unders as alternative ad formats.

Under the hood, Clicksor scans the text on your website and serves ads using the latest contextual technology. This results in a higher click-through rate. Installation is a breeze with the Clickso plugin for Blogger, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Whereas you’ll just need to download and activate to get going.

Takeaway,

On one side, the internet still provides a number of ways for publishers to make money. Particularly, from the traffic that passes through their websites each day. There are numerous web advertising networks you can use to start monetizing your website content.

Unfortunately, most successful monetization efforts involve finding a strategy specific to a site’s target demographic. Luckily, there are some strategies that universally work better than others. That said,  some of them even include ad networks for publishers to get started with.

On the other side, nobody likes to work without pay unless it is for charity. That’s why there are hundreds of web advertising networks out there. But not all of them will give the right value for your website. Or even for each blog post that you own. And as such, you should consider choosing them wisely.

More Related Topic Links:

1. Online Marketing | What Beginner Marketers Should Know
2. Video Advertising | 9 Pros & Cons Marketers should know
3. Display Ads | How to Increase your Website Ads Revenue
4. YouTube Advertising | 5 Benefits of Using Video Ads
5. AdDollars | The Advertising Marketplace You Should Know

Finally, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading and have understood some of the key web advertising networks for your overall website monetization.

But, if you’ll have any other additional contributions, suggestions, or even questions, please feel free to Contact Us and let us know how we can help you. And, by the same token, you can also share your additional thoughts and insights in our comments section below.