Recently, I’ve been playing with different ad sites and applying them to my different websites.
If you haven’t noticed, on my main blog, I’ve decided not to use AdBrite anymore, which for some reason dropped a lot in ad revenue over the past months. I switched to Text Link Ads, which was advertised by dnScoop and so far, I’ve made $19.07 in the past month, which I’m happy about.
They even have their own WordPress plugin. They sell ads for both the overall site and individual blog posts. I currently have 3 blog posts with ads:
At first I had no idea that the plugin actually wrote an extra paragraph on the bottom, followed by Related Link, so I had actually hacked the plugin to add additional entries to the top ad block.
I’ve also been experimenting with different colors and styles to make the ads not look as ugly. I have to say, the default ad block was rather ugly (if you recall seeing it for the past few weeks). I’ve updated it to a new background color and I think the top and bottom borders actually make it look decent.
Of course if you’re registered on this site, you won’t be seeing the ads.
However, Text Link Ads is picky with which sites they use. They only allow ads on certain sites that reach a minimum audience and apparently all my other sites are too new or don’t have enough viewers yet to join the Text Link Ads program. So for those, I’ve stuck with AdBrite for now.
However, I’ve been having a lot of problems with AdBrite recently with it posting semi-adult ads on my sites. For Ad content, the default is “Only clean, family-friendly ads” and I’ve double checked that’s the selection I have for all my ad zones. They have this option “Also include edgier ads (but still no adult ads)”, which I’ve never selected.
I disabled the auto-approval of network ads and these edgier ads stopped appear, since I assume they’re only showing the ads I’ve approved. I contacted AdBrite support and inquire about this and they said this should not have been the case and asked for screenshots so they can investigate the problem. I re-enabled the auto-approval of network ads and 30 minutes, these semi-adult ads started popping up:
I immediately took some screenshots and disabled the auto-approval of network ads again. I’ve sent them the screenshots. We’ll see what their response is.