11 Best Google AdSense Alternatives

Looking for the best Google AdSense alternatives to help you
monetize your website? While AdSense is the biggest name in display
advertising, it’s far from the only option. Whether you’re looking for
something to replace AdSense or just another complementary advertising option
completely, there are plenty of other services that you can use to monetize
your site. In this post, I’ve collected 11 of the best advertising platforms.
Some offer almost a 1:1 replacement for AdSense, while others give you
something a little unique, like text ads, contextual product suggestions, and
more.

Let’s get going so you can start earning…

1. Media.net

Media.net is the most popular 1:1 AdSense alternative on
this list as it’s the contextual ad product from Yahoo/Bing. It will serve up
relevant ads based on the content on each page of your site, including both
text and display ads Like AdSense, you can create your custom display ads or
let Media.net figure out the sizes that get you the best results. If you only
try one AdSense alternative on this list, I would recommend it be this one. The
minimum payout at Media.net is $100, which is a bit higher than some of the
other AdSense alternatives on this list.

2. Monumetric

Monumetric helps you make money by filling your ad inventory
with the highest C.P.M. offers available. Essentially, you set up the ad
inventory that you have available on your site. Then, Monumetric helps you fill
it in the way that earns you the most money for the impressions that you’re
getting. Monumetric has a reputation for being publisher-focused, with tools to
help you manage which ads appear on your site and where they display. For
example, if you don’t want to display ads from a certain company or industry,
Monumetric makes it easy for you to avoid those advertisers. Monumetric works
with sites starting at just 10,000 page views per month. However, if your site
is under 80,000 page views, Monumetric charges a one-time $99 setup fee.

3. BuySellAds

BuySellAds is notable in that it’s not about automatically
displaying contextual ads as you get with AdSense. Instead, you can list your
ad inventory in the BuySellAds marketplace, where advertisers can directly
purchase it. For example, you can say, “I have this footer ad spot that
gets 30,000 impressions. I’ll sell it for $300 per month”. Then,
advertisers can easily purchase that inventory through BuySellAds – it’s all
automated. If you like that approach, definitely give BuySellAds a look. The
only downside is that BuySellAds will only work with your site if you’re
getting over 100,000 page views per month.

Note: At some point, you’ll have ad space available and
nothing displaying until your ad space is sold. To ensure you’re not losing out,
you can set “backfill” ads to run until your ads sell. One option is
to pick out high converting affiliate offers from popular affiliate marketing
platforms – they’ll give you banner codes to copy and paste.

4. Amazon Associates/Native Shopping Ads

Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliate network. While a lot
of people only think about Amazon Associates in the context of manually
inserting relevant affiliate links into content, Amazon Associates also has its
contextual advertising offering called Native Shopping Ads. 

With Native
Shopping Ads, Amazon will automatically display relevant products based on the
content of each page on your site. If your visitors click on those products and
make a purchase, you’ll get an affiliate commission just as if you’d manually
inserted the link yourself. The only downside is that you’ll still only get
paid if someone makes a purchase – you won’t get paid just for impressions or
clicks as you do with AdSense. 

The minimum payout threshold at Amazon
Associates are $10.

If you decide to use Amazon Associates, make sure you
familiarize yourself with all the rules, as Amazon Associates is a lot stricter
than other affiliate networks. For example, you cannot cloak Amazon affiliate
links.

5. PropellerAds

PropellerAds can help you monetize your website with a
variety of different ad types, including some aggressive ad types that may or
may not be right for you. The two tamest ad formats are:

Native banners which contain contextual ads related to your
content.

Smart links which automatically take users to the most
relevant offer

If you want to get more aggressive, PropellerAds can also
help you with it…

Click/popunder ads

Interstitials which appear before or after specific pages on
your site

Push notifications, which let you advertise even after the person has left your site (if they accept your request to display push
notifications)

PropellerAds offers weekly payouts and the minimum payment the amount is just $5.

6. Skimlinks

Skimlinks uses a similar approach to the Sovrn //Commerce
(VigLink) network. Essentially, it scans your content for mentions of the over
48,500 affiliate merchants in the Skimlinks’ network. If it finds a mention,
Skimlinks automatically adds an affiliate link to give you a chance to earn a
commission. The nice thing is that, because it has so many affiliate merchants
in its network, you don’t have to deal with a bunch of separate programs. The
minimum payment is just $10, but Skimlinks operates on a Net 90 basis, which
means you’ll have to wait a bit to get paid.

7. Bidvertiser

Bidvertiser helps you monetize your website with a variety
of ad formats, including display banners, popunders, sliders, smartlinks, and
programmatic ads. They guarantee 100% coverage for both desktop and mobile
visitors, which means you’ll always have some type of ad display. While
Bidvertiser does support some more aggressive ad types (like popunders), they
have a compliance team to ensure that the advertisers themselves are on the up
and up.

The minimum payout at Bidvertiser is just $10.

8. Infolinks

Infolinks offers a variety of ad types to help you monetize
your site:

These give you a good range of both aggressive and
unobtrusive options and Infolinks has a pretty good reputation as far as the
quality of its advertisers.

The minimum payout at Infolinks is $50.

9. Revcontent

Revcontent is a somewhat exclusive ad network that focuses
more on quality than quantity, which is good if you’re concerned about your
site’s reputation. You have a lot of control over which ads display, and you
can remove ads that you don’t want to display on your site. Revcontent requires
a minimum of 50,000 visitors per month to apply, and they reject a lot of
publishers. If you make it in, the minimum payout is $50.

10. AdRecover

In 2019, around 26% of Internet users were using ad blockers
to block advertising. Why does that matter? 

Because AdRecover is an advertising
network that’s focused specifically on helping you monetize your visitors who
use ad blockers. It does this by displaying fast-loading, user-friendly ads
that are compliant with ad blockers.

For example, AdBlock participates in the Acceptable Ads
program, which lists out certain criteria that ads must meet to bypass the ad
blocker. AdRecover’s ads meet those requirements, which is why some, but not
all, ad blockers will still allow them.

In total, AdRecover supports these three ad blockers:

To join AdRecover, you’ll need at least 10,000 adblocked
page views per month. Based on ad-block usage, that means you’ll probably need
40-50,000 monthly page views.

11. PopCash

As the name suggests, PopCash is a popular popunder
advertising network. Popunder ads are aggressive, and they may or may not be
right for your website. But if you’re ok with the strategy, PopCash is one of
the best ad platforms dedicated to this type of ad. PopCash offers fast approvals, daily payments, and the
minimum payment is just $10, which means you can be up and earning in no time.

And while the ads are popunders, PopCash does have both
internal and external monitoring processes to ensure that the ads are clean and
free of malware.

Which is the best AdSense alternative for you? All of these
AdSense alternatives have something to offer – it just depends on… How
aggressive you want to be with your monetization? What type of ads do you want
to display? How much control do you want over which ads are displayed? Your
tolerance level for the chance that a scummy advertiser slips through and gets
displayed on your site. If you want something like AdSense where you can pretty
much just set it and forget it and serve up clean, contextual ads, I think
Media.net makes a great starting point.

 As I mentioned, it’s probably the
closest thing to AdSense itself in terms of approach. Monumetric is another
great option if you want more control over which ads display and are concerned
about your site’s reputation. And you’ll never go wrong with Amazon Associates,
though product ads may or may not work well for your site.

AdRecover is also a good source for high-quality ads, though
it’s limited in its scope because it only targets visitors who are using ad
blockers.

BuySellAds also offers a unique marketplace approach where
things are closer to direct ad sales than all these other AdSense alternatives.