AdSense and QuickAds!

There are a few ways to generate revenue from a site:

1. Sell advertising
2. Ask people to donate/subscribe
3. Sell merchandise

This site will start off trying advertising through different ad networks and perhaps try the other options at a later date. Now, it might appear that Google's AdSense network is the only game in town but that is definitely not the case. There are Kontera, Advertising.com, CPX Interactive, Specific Media, and Vibrant Media (those annoying "Intellitxt" link mouseover popups) to name a few. There's also a new player on the scene called ScribeFire that is offering the QuickAds system, which aggregates many advertising networks and dynamically selects the most profitable ads to display on a site. I decided to try two systems, one that's proven but conservative in revenue earning potential (AdSense) and one that is new and unproven but with a higher earning potential (QuickAds).

Signing Up

Not much to say here, really. Both AdSense and QuickAds have a similar, simple signup process and then a period of waiting for account approval. AdSense took roughly four days to get approved while QuickAds took about a day.

Placing Ads on the Blog

Once accounts with the ad networks are confirmed, the next step is getting the ads hooked into the blog.

AdSense

Google owns both AdSense and Blogger.com and has done a good job of integrating AdSense placement into the blog control panel. In the layout editor, one can simply click to add a new element to the page:

Editing an ad's size and color scheme is just as simple:

QuickAds

ScribeFire maintains a Firefox blog editor extension named ScribeFire (previous known as Performancing). Integrated into this blog editor is a tab for managing a QuickAds account and the ads that display on a website. Just like Blogger.com/AdSense, placing ads on the blog is as simple and point and click. Unlike Blogger.com/AdSense, ScribeFire supports over a dozen blog services and platforms. Here you can see a new horizontal ad being placed below the blog's header:

At first, there was a problem getting ads inserted using the ScribeFire editor because of the custom domain that Transitech uses: the editor would not recognize feed.transisted.com as a valid URL for the blog and it prevented ads from being added to the blog. A bug report was filed and almost right away there was a reply from one of the developers with a fixed version of the extension. An unexpectedly pleasant experience, overall.

Note: while placing the ads I ran into the perplexing problem of no ads actually appearing. I thought that perhaps something was set up incorrectly or my accounts weren't fully ready yet. Then, I noticed the little ABP icon in the Firefox toolbar! I use AdBlock Plus, a Firefox extension that filters out advertising content to speed up the web browsing and remove those ridiculously annoying popups and text link mouseovers (*cough* Intellitxt *cough*). Adding an exception to the ABP filters for feed.transisted.com fixed the problem. The incident got me thinking about what to do with readers that also block ads. I think I came up with a good solution that is already implemented on the blog and will be covered in another post shortly.

Which is better?

AdSense has many ad sizes to choose from (24, actually) and their appearance is low-profile and non-intrusive. QuickAds has only three(!) ad sizes (vertical, horizontal, and box) and a very limited set of color scheme options. Some of the QuickAds ads also appear to be eye catching gouging flash pieces that don't exactly blend with the pages. To be fair, QuickAds has to work with various ad networks and their varying ad sizes so they probably had to target the lowest common denominator.

Inserting ads into the blog was easy with both systems so real litmus test will be which produces more revenue over time. The two systems remind of the two ends of the investment spectrum. On one end there is the more conservative system (AdSense) with the predictable, lower revenue and on the other end is the riskier, unproven system (QuickAds) with a much higher yield potential.