I have been having a tough time trying to sort out all the Adsense alternatives. So, rather than trying to absorb all the positive aspects of a program (hype), I decided to apply my standard test of negativity, by searching Google for the phrase, in quotes, of "program-name $ucks" (dollar sign is an S). Here are the Google SERP results of 44 searches. 550 - Intellitxt (pretty $ucky - personally, I hate these) 536 - Adsense (huge, to be expected) 429 - Chitika (some spell it with a S) 148 - Adbrite 141 - Clicksor 125 - Bidvertiser 105 - Miva (FindWhat/Espotting) 70 - Yahoo YPN (surprisingly low, considering the targeting issues) 41 - ExpoActive 19 - Kanoodle 15 - Kontera 13 - Intellitext (with an e) 8 - TargetPoint 6 - AdEngage 6 - RevenuePilot 6 - SearchFeed 5 - Fastclick 5 - Valueclick 2 - Adhearus 2 - Oxado 1 - AllFeeds 1 - Azoogleads 1 - BidClix 1 - Casale Media 1 - Claxon 1 - Enhance Interactive 0 - Adgenta 0 - Adsonar 0 - AffiliateSensor 0 - Auctionads 0 - BannerBoxes 0 - CBProSense 0 - ClicksAdsDirect 0 - ContextWeb 0 - Crispads 0 - Exoclick 0 - InfoGrabber 0 - Mirago 0 - Nixxie 0 - Q-Ads 0 - Quigo 0 - TextLinkAds 0 - Tribal Fusion 0 - Veoda What is wrong with this approach? 1. Big companies are going to have big complaints, in general. On the other hand, TextLinkAds and Tribal Fusion are big, but have no complaints (a complaint here is defined as a "program-name $ucks" page). 2. Small companies may have no complaints because they are SO SMALL, and may not be worth bothering with. Few users will result in few complaints. What is good about this approach? 1. YOU can confirm the sample data. 2. YOU can query any company I have left out. 3. YOU can get a general idea about any company. 4. YOU can read all the negative SERPs for that company. 5. YOU may be able to save time, by eliminating the worst programs up front. Personally, I was leaning toward Clicksor or AdBrite, but now I am not so sure. Oh, well, another data point. What do you think?
Interesting Data. I thought bidvertiser would be higher.... they are scammers for sure.... I would go on, but im in a happy mood
Might also consider doing a percentage. Get the number of times program-name appears and divide that into the number of occurrences of it sucking. That at least introduces some relativity into it. If a program is mentioned 80 times and 30 of those are bad, well, might look elsewhere. If 30 are bad out of 4000, might give it another look. In your example, intellitxt and Adsense look like they are neck and neck, however, doing the search I suggest above shows that adsense shows up overall about 25-30 times more than intellitxt. Thus it's more like 500 bads vs 20 bads when you normalize the data.
There used to be a company named "Adhearus". Are they still doing business? Thee guys scammed me back in 2004. Interesting stats. Well adbrite's payout maybe low but they are not scammers. I have received two cheques from them till date and I am currently testing kontera.
Adhearus? There's a blast from the past! I believe these guys still operate but are about as popular as a fart in a spacesuit!
Adpubster - I agree completely - the quick look can be deceptive, without relativity. Your method sounds very good. Don't know if I feel inspired enough to do it, but maybe - a lot more work. Endurer - Adhearus is on the list. I wasted time on them last year. This is the very reason I am performing my analysis, trying to avoid yet another similar bad experience. Switching and testing takes a heck of a lot of time, and is very costly. If the performance turns out to be poor, you may as well have been piffing in the wind.
OK, then. Here is the "relative" data - The best alternative programs are NEAR the TOP of the list. The formula I used was ("name" searches/"namesucks" searches) divided by 100. I divided by 100 just to make the numbers easier to look at. All the programs with zero complaints are omitted, since there are no complaints. This COULD mean that these are some of the best programs, especially if the number of "name" searches is high. For instance, Mirago looks GOLDEN! AHH, but then geolocation may come into play. Mirago is England, and I am California. Am I seeing an accurate picture? Dunno. CountryBoy- Oxado doesn't look quite so bad from this data, ? And, of course, the newer companies should have fewer complaints, just due to less time. OK. Who is up for performing the same analysis on Yahoo? MSN? I suspect that the results may be similar. I have just applied to Casale Media, due to this data.
Could this list be further refined by doing a search for "XXXX sucks" and adding that to the figures as well? Then there would be neutral, positive and negative stats for each site.
You are correct, what I meant to say was it could be further refined with searches for "company X" , company X sucks" and "company X is awesome" or some such word combo. Since right now we have BAD compared with NEUTRAL. It may be interesting to see BAD, GOOD and NEUTRAL google indexed pages. But on second thought I believe what he did is good enough and probably needs no further refinement.
At first I thought the data was pretty useless but the (C/CS)/100 score is interesting. This makes me want to test TextLinkAds even more now.
biased result, adsense and intellitxt are more famous than others and therefore more people write about them
More people write about them but he is not just listing the sheer volume of hits but rather the proportion or the ratio of negatives vs. total mentions.
There is one flaw in this approach. The sites below yahoo most pay so little no one stays with the program long enough to get paid. So most people will not say they suck because they never waited long enough to see if they pay. Yahoo is impressive for such a low count and being that big. Adsense is one of the better ones but terms are tough. Adengage is ok. Clicksor is ok low paying. search feed very low paying kanoodle i droped them no earnings. The rest i would not bother with. Search feed and the rest have hard time coming up with search terms. They do not have alot of sites paying to advertise. I bet they advetise thier own programs and use your site and pay very little.
Hmm.. interesting approach.. Let me add my $.02 to the Google mix: Adbrite SUCKS Yahoo SUCKS (and will continue to suck until they can learn to deliver a targeted ad) AzoogleAds isnt bad (not bad enough to use the "S" word) Kontera is the closest thing to Adsense with regards to earnings and ease of use..
wormy - "It may be interesting to see BAD, GOOD and NEUTRAL google indexed pages." Yes, it would. I picked BAD, because "sucks" is an almost universal word to describe poor performance. For GOOD, one would have to search for excellent, best, superb, wonderful, etc. - too many possibilities. And NEUTRAL, I have no idea how to do that, without reading every post. rcj662- "There is one flaw in this approach." I think that there are many more than one. But I am trying to add a "new view" of program analysis, to counter all the hype we read about each program. I would really like to see a summary, condensed list of complaints, ordered by "complaint type". But I am not going to spend THAT MUCH time. So I was shooting for the quick picture, which can be misleading, of course, but it is SOMETHING. It's just a starting point, to possibly reduce the number of programs that must be explored. "The rest I would not bother with." Yes! The problem is defining "the rest" - it varies with each person's opinion. I do value ALL opinions. I am trying to zero-in on what MOST folks would consider "the rest", by consensus. I would like to create a kind of "universal avoidance list", which is difficult because everyone feels differently. I'm looking for "common complaints". Multiple complaints of the same type. For instance, YPN can't target. This is pretty much universally accepted, based solely upon the number of posts. (My most recent test - Out of 54 ads, 9 might possibly be described as "targeted".) Another example - Most of the ads that Adhearus served were - you got it - ads for Adhearus. Saving people (especially myself) time is what I want to do. Trying all the programs is just not feasible. I mentioned that I applied to Casale Media, but it is Sunday, so I am still waiting. My first impression is NOT good. I received a computer email telling me to "RESPOND to this email with any questions". I did. Next email - "we do not respond to this email address". I follow directions, do what they say, and I am WRONG! How daft! If this is a precursor for the rest of the program, I'm not interested. What with first impressions, and all.
OK, just what are we trying to avoid here. "Scammers" is not quite descriptive enough for me, so here is (the start) of a list of the complaints, listed by order of importance (my guesses) - 1. Non-paying - No payout ... Pure fraud 2. Low paying - Very low EPC- Biggest complaint? ... Skimming ... Over-hyping - Lying about what payout will be ... Declining payout - Started out good (YPN was initial enticement, and now Google seemingly is feeling pressure) ... No ad inventory - Some say it is ALWAYS the inventory issue, which means no targeting -> no CTR -> no $ ... ... (In my experience, Adsense is INFINITELY superior in inventory, and just as importantly, knows how to SERVE it.) ... No targeting - Low CTR=Low payout ... Poor targeting - Low CTR=Low payout ... Non-existant publisher program - the utterly clueless Micro$oft (we're taking over, we just don't know when to start) 3. Obnoxious Ad format - Popups, popunders, idiotic intellitxt ads (that double-underline words like car), etc. ... I KNOW what a car is - why not pick a word like Escalade, the SUBJECT of the query. (Made up, but you get the idea) 4. Poor interface ... Painful to implement ads ... Stats - Not enough data provided (G is great, YPN won't provide summary data, or old data for comparison) ... Slow stats - Next day only (YPN, others) ... Stats frequently are down (frequently reported) ... Reported numbers do not make sense - vastly reduced from checks by monitoring applications 5. Slow paying - months vs. weeks, payment hassles, Paypal only (not for me) 6. Bans without warning or adequate explanation - a few hapless folks REALLY don't know why 7. Lack of transparency - Black box implementation, no explanation, take what we give you, and be happy, or hit the road And what would YOU like to add . . ??? .