Wise Startup Blog

From Grooveshark’s introduction of a wide-skyscraper ad, I’ve been charged with finding the highest paying CPM and CPC ad networks, and after about a week of testing, I have some results that you may find useful as you try to pick the best advertising network for your site.

First, some definitions. CPM networks pay you based on the number of impressions you show (cost per mili). So if you show 10,000 impressions per day, at a $5 CPM, you would net $50 (10*5).

For CPC, it is very simple. Everytime someone clicks on an ad you show, you get paid (cost per click). It is also known as PPC.

Best CPM Networks

What are the highest paying CPM networks? What about the ad networks with the best fill-rate and eCPMs (effective CPMs).

Tribal Fusion
This network has very high-quality advertisers and requires that all publishers be manually approved, and have traffic that exceeds 2,000 uniques per month. We’re receiving about a $2 eCPM from them, which is pretty good.

BannerConnect
BannerConnect has also been a pretty reliable source for our CPM traffic. We have been giving them remnant inventory, and they have been able to do a pretty good job with it. All of our traffic goes through Technorati, then Tribal Fusion, and then to Banner Connect, and BannerConnect is still able to deliver us around $1 eCPM.

Best CPC Networks

A lot of people that don’t have the traffic for CPM networks like to use CPC so that they can start generating some revenue while they build up the traffic needed for the 2,000 dailies that Tribal Fusion asks for.

AdStation
This has been one of the best CPC networks I’ve worked with, ranging from the bottom-barrel $.10 CPCs, AdStation is a welcome relief. We were seeing CPCs that averaged around $1, for certain offers. Beware, that you must be returning conversions for them, otherwise the system will drop your CPC significantly. These are one of the top CPC networks I recommend for anyone.

Google Adsense
I really hate to put such an obvious product on like Google’s Adsense, but it really is a great resource for CPC traffic. They do not do a good job with CPMs, and sometimes the display ads can be very poor. I recommend using them with text links, and to embed them into your site and make the advertisements appear as content, because their display inventory is rather poor. We actually are looking at eliminating them from our ad rotations.

What Are The Best CPM & CPC Ad Networks?

So experimentation is the name of the game. You should be looking up everysingle ad network and signing up for them, I have a list of all the networks we have an account with, and let me know if you need an introduction yourself to get the ball rolling:

Adroll
ROI Rocket
AdToll
Ad Brite
Google Adsense
linkshare
casale media
bidvertiser
AdOn Network
buysellads.com
Advertising.com
WidgetBucks
AdsDaq
AdConion
Burst direct / 247 real media
Adjug
Videoegg
Tribalfusion
Komli
Bannerconnect
Lookery
Underdog media
Widgetbucks
Marimedia
Integri
Interclick

Let us know in the comments your experience with the best ad networks are. I’m personally looking for a good network for this blog, since I’m not yet at the point where I have 2,000 daily uniques. Let me know your experience.