Beginners Guide to Third Party Ad Networks

If you are looking to earn a small residual income from your blog then the easiest way to do so is by displaying third party ads on your pages. But, what exactly do I mean by a third party ad? Though huge organizations like Yahoo!, Youtube, FaceBook etc. can lure in advertisers on their own as a small time blogger you will be best advised to rely on an agency like Google Adsense which has 1000s of network ads from 100s of different advertisers which it will rotate amongst all the various sites and pages in their system. Such third party ad servers are mainly of 3 types and here's a quick look.

Cost Per Click ( CPC )
As the name suggests, CPC ad providers will pay you a share of the revenue they generate when a valid click is registered on one of their adblocks on your site. The keyword here is click. CPC ad networks are possibly the most popular and often the only alternative available to small publishers and bloggers.

Some popular CPC ad networks available to site with almost no requirement include: 

1. Bidvertiser
2. Taggify
3. Chitika (before signing up be sure to read about the Chitika    Revenue Audit)

Cost Per Mile ( CPM )
Here the name is somewhat of a misnomer. What CPM or cost per mile basically means is the amount money paid to you for a specific number of page views (typically 1000). CPM ad providers usually restrict their service to large (over 100,000 views a month) and those who do serve ads to small publishers and bloggers usually offer very poor rates (around $1/1000 views) and will not be worth your while. Another issue with CPM ad providers is that sometimes they don't monetize traffic from all the countries. But the great benefit of CPM ads is they convert traffic directly into revenue without any worries about poor click through rates.

Some popular CPM ad networks include:

1. Tribal Fusion
2. Casale Media
3. Burst Media

A Combination of CPC and CPM

Many sites also offer both CPC and CPM ads. This is how the system usually works: you get to fix  a CPM rate for your site. One or more advertisers may bid for that space in your website. But until anyone agrees to pay your minimum CPM rate you will be served (usually low paying) CPC ads called "network ads".

Some such sites are:

1. Adbrite
2. Adhitz

Other Kind of Ad networks

There are several other kinds of ad netwroks as well such as:

1. In-line ad networks (Infolink, Konterra, Text Link Ads)
2. Pop-up or pop-under and similar ad netwroks (Affinity)
3. Ad networks which monetize outgoing links (Taggify, Link Bucks)