Thanks for checkin' this thread. I'm looking to find some advertisers who aren't quite as picky about content as say, Adsense. Obviously it'd be good if you know them to be reliable so please let me know who you personally profit with. I'm building a bigger site and I don't want to have to censor it in terms of what advertisers do or don't want. Hopefully that doesn't mean I'm stuck with porn advertisers, but whatever, I guess. Thanks for any tips!
I'm interested to hear about some of the more "liberal" advertisers too. Although my site has no pornographic content, sometimes the language is not family friendly. I have been rejected by several advertisers because of my "freedom of speech" stance. You would think there would be some advertisers out there who could fill this niche.
Hitman11: You're absolutely right. I'm not interested in 'adult entertainment' nearly as much as I am allowing people to talk the same way they would in person. Google's policy allows for a lot of guessing, to say the least. And that's fine, that's their right as a company to uphold any values they so choose and I'll respect that, but at the same time with so much "gray" it's hard to figure out who's going to take the thousands of clicks you send them and then randomly decide you've done something inappropriate and not pay you. I understand company's want to be careful whom they associate their products and services with, but at the same time forcing people to restrict their expression to "business-friendly" levels (whatever they may be) still restricts people. There seems to me to be an ever-eroding right to speak one's mind online as more and more people come online. Despite the fact that it's NOT the same as in public where you might not be able to escape someone screaming profanity, for instance, online all we have to do is close the window of the offending website. The value of the web is that people of all kinds can congregate based on shared interests or values or other elements they feel strongly about. Didn't mean for that to be a little speech, but it's been on my mind lately. And can you post a bit more about what ABCSearch is about, ABC_Cel? If not I can PM, but it seems like other folks might want to hear about it, also.
I agree totally. You're speaking my language. There seems to be two extremes in the internet advertising market, either G-rated or X-rated. My site is mostly guys talking about guy stuff, so it falls in the middle of the spectrum. It's a site that is work safe, but you wouldn't want to let your 10 year old read it. It would be great to find more advertisers geared towards my site demographic.
Re: ABCSearch... I know people have mixed reviews about us, but we've really changed our business model and over the past two years that I've been here, it's definitely changed ten fold. We're a tier 2 meta search engine, and have the capability of delivering you ads via XML feed, content banners, search boxes or in-text solutions. We're definitely looking for quality affiliates with quality users and know they do come in all shapes and sizes, hence, we don't discriminate on pages. Since everything is keyword based, ads will display in your page based on keyword, thus you'll only get adult terms if you type in adult keywords. For us, it's definitely the quality of the click and not the page content. Although we do draw the line with things like brutality and pedophiles... things like that. But there's no question whether you'll get paid on clicks. Let me know if you have any other questions=)
Great to see some info here from you advertisers, thanks for chiming in! I'm glad to see there's more available for less than G-rated sites, like Hitman was saying. A lot of times it's difficult if you've got a site where people are discussing theory and the like or stating strong opinions, to get people to understand that things are theoretical in nature and not always absolute declarations, etc. Like Hitman says, "guy stuff" and I'm sure in their own terms, "girl stuff" can get interpreted certain ways, as well. The whole point of the net is to be able to have discussions with a wider assortment of people and form those relationships we might not be able to on the street in our own towns. I'm not ready to make a decision on advertisers quite yet, so anyone else have more recommendations?
I suppose you're only interested in PPC advertisers, aren't you? I know AdBrite isn't too picky when it comes to adding sites to their network, but I also suppose you've already considered them. AdEngage/Etology may also do good on your site.