Skyrocket Radio websites come with a custom banner ad management system that is perfect for scheduling and displaying local client banner ads. We have also included the ability for you to add third party banner ad networks. These are similar to “national spots” in the radio world and used as an additional revenue stream to local sales.
Some websites have seen excellent results from only including third-party banner ad networks on their websites. They might not have the technical and business development infrastructure to recruit their own advertiser accounts and serve their own ads. As a result, they rely on other websites, third party advertisement serving companies, to recruit advertisers and serve those ads on publishers’ sites. This arrangement allows websites to focus on what they do best – provide content.
Most, if not all, third-party ad networks pull information and post ads based on the browsing history of the person viewing your page. If a visitor recently searched for the price on new boats, boat ads are likely to appear. They may rotate with other ads that are similar like a vacation to an island since obviously they like the water. If you regularly keep your browser cookies list cleared, then you’ll likely see a national ad or regional ads based on the area in which you are located.
Types of Online Ads
Don’t just think of banner ads as images. Here are the main types of ads available from these networks.
Targeted Text Ads: These ads are text-based and are usually found in groups. They are targeted to match the site’s content or the search phrase that was used on a search engine to bring them to your station page.
In-Text: These style of ads popup when you hover over selected text phrases with your mouse. A small box pops up and usually contains either text, image, or even a video as well as the link.
Display: Display ads contain images, headlines, body text and other elements used to get a viewer’s attention. Sizes range from eighth page to full page ads.
Banner: These are your typical image ads you see on many sites. They can be just the image or an image with a text line above or below it. Sizes range from button size to half page and come in all orientations.
Banner Ad Networks
Below is a list of third-party banner ad networks to consider. There are dozens of networks available so this is not an exhaustive list. Many of the third-party banner ad networks we found had minimum page view requirements that would have been nearly impossible for smaller markets to achieve. All of these recommendations have NO minimum page view requirements at printing.
Adsense
By far, Google Adsense is the foremost name in third-party banner ad management. It’s incredibly easy to get started with Google Adsense. You can easily customize the look and the feel of your advertisements to make sure that it fits nicely with your website.
Adsense includes advanced reports, specials templates, and other such features that give you the ability to optimize to your heart’s content. Google allows up to 3 banner ads any page at once.
The payouts and financial earnings are actually quite good and you can start earning from the first day you put some ads on your radio station website. Few other networks can promise near-instant returns on your time commitment. If your station website gets global traffic (which many of them will) Adsense can provide global monetization and display ads based on their location.
You must have have a free Google account and your website has to be verified by Google. This verification process takes about a day and includes checking for original content as well as for copyrighted material. If your station regularly posts copyrighted images and content, even with proper attribution, Google will not approve Adsense to appear on your website.
Or, once approved, they may revoke access and ban your website from having an Adsense account. Also, it’s important to note that if you even accidentally click on an ad on your site you could be banned for life.
Some site owners feel that Google AdSense rules are just too strict. However, if you are providing local news and limiting the amount of copyrighted information (photos) you should be just fine.
AdCash
AdCash is one of the foremost advertising networks providing high-quality ads from leading brands. They support all industry standard sizes as well as exclusive display formats such as site under, footer, interstitial, slide-in, background, and more. It has over 1000 ad campaigns running on its platform—the big inventory means better ad targeting.
BidVertiser
In addition to earning money for each ad that is clicked, BidVertiser publishers also earn additional revenue when the click leads to a conversion (i.e. sale) for the advertiser.
BidVertiser supports multiple ad formats including banners, skyscrapers, rectangles, and mobile. You can also 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.
BlogAds
An ad network that specifically caters to bloggers. Set up is easy and you can manage multiple sites from one account. There’s a high level of control over your advertising by letting you determine which ad sizes to offer, set your own prices, customize the appearance of ads, and accept or reject certain ads.
There are no monthly fees; instead, BlogAds keep 14% of sales made to your readers. Most common IAB ad sizes are supported.
Chitika
A popular alternative to AdSense, Chitika has over 350K publishers on its network and serves over four billion ads per month.
Its proprietary targeting and optimization technology uses programmatic buying to serve precisely the right ad, at the right time. The approval process for new publishers is usually pretty straightforward and takes little time.
Clicksor
Clicksor offers publishers multiple ad formats including contextual banner ads, clickable text, rich media, interstitials, and pop-unders as alternative ad formats. All ads displayed to your visitors are context sensitive so they will be more likely to click.
Conversant Media
A real-time publisher interface offers fully transparent campaign reporting along with activity and revenue data. Their cross-platform advertising solutions ensure that publishers are able to maximize their revenue from mobile devices.
In addition to standard display, they offer ads in multiple other formats such as in-text rollovers, static, rich media, banners, over the page and more.
Infolinks
Infolinks ad network currently serves targeted ads on over 200K websites. They work best on sites that contain large amounts of text based content. Infolinks will not approve a site if they feel it is lacking content so this network is best used on a news heavy site.
Infolinks’ main ad type is their in-text ad links. Selected words on your page are selected and either double underlined or dotted underlined. When a visitor scrolls over one of the words, a pops up containing an ad relevant to the word appears.
They also have an ad block called related tags. These are very similar in look to AdSense horizontal link blocks.
Media.Net
Media.Net gives you exclusive access to the Yahoo! Bing Network. They are one of the world’s largest contextual ad networks and boast many top publishers like Forbes, Esquire, Reuters, and Good Housekeeping. Like Adsense, they review each website and to decide approval.
Media.Net offers publishers several ad styles but it’s important to note that they only allow one of each ad type to appear on a page. The main ad style available is the content ad. These are contextual ad blocks that are available in different sizes.
They also have a search targeting ad type. These appear the same way as contextual ads but are only displayed to search engine traffic.
This may be the closest AdSense alternative available. But, read and follow the rules carefully. Apparently, they are known for suspending accounts and not stating the reason.
PropellerAds
PropellerAds support banner ads in all standard sizes such as 728×90, 300×250, 160×600, 120×600, and even in-banner video ad formats. They have 3,000 active campaigns worldwide and perform manual checks to remove all unsafe and suspicious advertisers—ensuring high ad quality.
Publishers get the benefit of a 100% monetized inventory, on-time payouts, a personal account manager, and detailed real-time reporting.
PulsePoint
PulsePoint is an ad network that processes 110 billion ad transactions each month across its platform. There are no sign up fees or hidden costs.
Their proprietary contextual ensures better ad targeting and increase relevance, giving publishers the opportunity to monetize impressions buyers would normally overlook.
Revcontent
Revcontent is one of the biggest content recommendation platforms on the internet. Revcontent does not have a minimum page view requirement but they are notoriously difficult to join. They reject almost 98% of websites that apply – focusing more on the quality of its publisher network rather than the quantity. This strategy has helped Revcontent generate higher revenues, better engagement rates, and loyal audiences for their partners.
If your station website is generating more of a regional audience than hyper-local, you shouldn’t have a problem getting approved.
RevenueHits
RevenueHits offers a nice variety of ad types including banners, pop ups, XML feeds, buttons, and interstitials.
They offer both contextual and geo-targeted ads. They are a performance-based network (CPA), not a CPC or CPM network. So make sure you understand that you are paid when a visitor to your site takes specific actions INSTEAD of being paid when they click on an ad.
Thalamus
Thalamus is a search engine for all paid media sources such as ad networks & publishers with data on over 50,000 vendors worldwide, including the networks listed above. Best of all, you can dial down on the precise kind of network you’re looking for. So, let’s say you’re looking for a mobile-only ad network that displays video ads, this is a good starting point.
You’ll need to signup for this service, but the cost is hard to beat – free.
Conclusion
We hope this list gives you an idea of the possibilities you have available. Our third-party ad network pick is Google Adsense because of the ease to implement and the reporting features. If your website is not approved or your Adsense approval is ever revoked, then you should be able to find a replacement above to continue generating additional online revenue for your station website.
All of these networks will require adding the code to your website. Please reach out to us for assistance in this process.
Hat tip to Vishveshwar Jatain at AdPushup for much of this research. Read his article on additional Ad Networks, some of which require a minimum number of page views each month.
