AdBrite Review
Posted on February 28th, 2006by Michael Gray in Advertising, Reviews
While I had heard of Phillip Kaplan and F**kedCompany.com before, I hadn’t heard of AdBrite until Pubcon in Las Vegas where Phillip spoke one morning. I spoke with the nice folks at the booth and decided to give it a shot a few months later.
Signing up for an account is fairly easy and painless, they ask you the standard typical questions like name address, payee tax information, and so on. You are then asked to input your site details and give some information about your website. The information meant to help your website get listed in the proper area, and help potential advertisers locate it. The most difficult part of the entire procedure is determining your prices. As a publisher you want to get the highest price possible for your advertising space. As the customer purchasing the ad you want to pay the lowest price possible. You can set various pricing models such as 7 day advertising, 1 month advertising, or any other time fame you want to create. I’d suggest keeping it simple and offering some sort of discount for monthly advertisers, but that’s just my opinion. You can also set up a pay per click model if you desire. The difficult thing is getting the price right. I’d suggest setting the price a little high and slowly working down until you start to get customers. Now you could go back and raise the price afterward, but unless things have changed that’s a dangerous path to start down. Once you get pricing worked out, it’s all down hill, a few simple lines of code that work via javascript and you’re in business. It may take a day or so for you get in the system so be patient, your ads will start to appear.
Once someone decides to advertise on your website you’ll get an email from the system alerting you there is a new ad up for review. As the site owner you have the ability to review and approve or reject ads, nothing will appear unless you approve it. Once approved it takes a few hours for advertising to start to appear on your site, so again be patient. Another thing you’ll notice is AdBrite starts to gather stats about your website, including things like Alexa Rank, page views per day, unique users per day, repurchase rate, and some estimated click through data. This information is available not only to potential advertising customers, but anyone who wants to look, so this program is best suited for websites you are comfortable with revealing some data about. Something to be aware of is, if you list more than one site in your AdBrite account, anyone who checks the stats will see the connection between the two websites. Personally that’s something I would like to see changed, but there are ways around the system for those who would like to remain anonymous.
So is Adbrite worth it? Well looking at my rates and stats you can see I’m not making a heck of a lot of money. However my intent here was experimentation not profitability. Looking at some other sites who use Adbrite like Friendster, Gawker, and NHL.com and you can see the prices jump up considerably. AdBrite does take a percentage of your advertising income. Looking around I can’t find the actual percentage listed on the site (they only give a vague reference to taking a percentage, and that’s something they should fix). Looking at my earnings report it looks to be about 25%. If you’re a small person and don’t mind doing the legwork of selling and billing advertisers yourself, you could probably do better on your own. If you don’t want the hassle it’s probably worth using a service like AdBrite. Additionally if you’d like to sell advertising on your site but don’t want to get involved with the hornets nest surrounding text links, this may be a very attractive solution for you. (For the record I fully support straight text link advertising, not only do I think it’s a viable and effective solution, I am customer of Text-Link-Ads.com).
Sixty days after you’ve hit your minimum payout (the lowest payout is $20) you’ll get a report via email telling you a check has been sent listing the amount and statistics for the pay period. You can also log into your account and see future payments and dates.
Is AdBrite for everyone, no. In my opinion AdBrite is a good solution for people who have sites with reasonable traffic that would be attractive to advertisers, and who want to focus on running the site and not selling and maintaining adverting placement, and billing. While the percentage they take may be a little high, it will give you one less thing to worry about, and let’s you focus on things like adding content and running your website. If you think you’d like to sign-up for Adbrite I have two links below one with an affiliate id one without, use whichever one you prefer.
Sign up for Adbrite (aff id)
Sign up for Adbrite (no aff)
Popularity: 30% [?]
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February 28th, 2006 at 8:46 am
I dropped the adbrite program the second I realised they allowed different sites to be connected. If they change that then I wil probably give them a try.
February 28th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Thanks for the report Michael.
February 28th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
Are you tracking the clickthoughs for the two adbrite links (aff vs. no aff?). Doesn’t look like it, but would be interesting social data.
Thanks for the overview, good stuff!
February 28th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Nope not tracking. Putting anything on the straight no aff link would have been bad mojo.
November 18th, 2006 at 11:05 am
Thanks for the review. Seems you and a few other people think AdBrite is a good service. Regretfully, my review of their service is less than stellar. The quality of vendors is horrible. Try reviewing their list of vendors and while you would probably have 5 - 7 pages you end up digging through 30 pages, at the time I write this, with so much duplication it’s simply astounding. Also, as best I can tell, there’s no way to know which vendor is sending the traffic so you end up keeping all the vendors with which you subscribe. Accountability is important to me. Maybe I look at things differently, but I wouldn’t recommend them in their current state of affairs.
February 16th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Gooooooooddddddddd
April 12th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Good review. I found this site http://www.Kumomo.com, which similiar to AdBrite but it is free and you can deal with the Advertiser directly. You can decide a certain percentage of your ad revenue to go a school building fund in Cambodia.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Bottomline, the cash is great.
But I have had 4 separate instances of an adbrite ad try to install trojan/virus stuff from systemdoctor.com
My computer got infected the first time, and it was extremely difficult to remove.
After I reported it each time, it would disappear, and then a couple weeks later, reappear.
I haven’t heard back from them about the last email I sent about it.
June 2nd, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Interesting article. I have joined the AdBrite market place some time ago. As I have recently noticed, they have removed my website PIXEL TEMPLATES (Category: Arts & Entertainment > Visual Arts) from their site directory. That doesnn’t make any sense, thus advertisers will never find me on their advertising platform. Unitl now, I have not received any response from AdBrite on this concern. Secondly, AdBrite does no longer display any ads on my website. This said, their slogan “Monetize your website with AdBrite” does not apply. I believe their fear I would get too many free leads from people browsing their site directory.
I have posted some comments directly on my website.
http://www.pixel-templates.com/about/
graphically & sincerely,
Marc Klein
June 12th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
i am currently trying out adbrite will post back on events
August 5th, 2007 at 11:10 am
I put adbrite up on my website in hopes to promote it. A couple things to note: many of the websites that my ad was on, were JUNK sites or were on a .RU (Russian) domain, which would redirect to a .COM. Many of these websites didn’t even have ads on them when I went and manually looked. Several more had “Page coming soon” links throughout the site. Who knows where the traffic was actually coming from (Note the above post about the trojan). The bottom line: ADBRITE IS A SCAM - AVOID THIS AT ALL COST!
August 21st, 2007 at 5:12 am
AdBrite is directly involved with spam websites such as DriveCleaner and PCTURBOPRO. We have a few videos documenting their involvement with DriveCleaner and PCTURBOPRO. What AdBrite disturbs me most is that they will bring spam messages and replace existing banners with those of DriveCleaner and PCTURBOPRO even after removing their ad codes.
September 15th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
This report of a trojan frightens me. Is it true?
October 4th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
While AdBrite may bring you lots of “traffic” do not expect conversions or any ROI. Their manner of listings is borderline fraudulent… Yes, they will show you a huge very detailed report tracking each any every site you paid for but you’ll find no customer revenue or site sales from any of them. Lack of customer support and service only compound the issues. If you are looking to actually generate revenue for your business (as opposed to just paying lots of money for NOTHING) save your money and avoid AdBrite.
October 7th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Oh man, I signed up for AdBrite months ago and sorta got sidetracked. Never did finish setting it up. Thanks for the reminder, I will give it a go today and see what happens.
I have read a few negative things about AdBrite but then again I read lots of negative things and take them with a grain of salt until I have tested them myself.
I will try to keep my focus long enough to implement AdBrite this time around.
October 28th, 2007 at 2:22 am
really? adbrite is a scam? i just now paid the $5 setup fee and created a banner for my webpage. and NOW i read this. lol, well if i start getting bogus traffic with no ROI. then i’m out…
BlackHatMoney.com
–=Shane
December 4th, 2007 at 7:09 am
Adbrite is a good option for sites & blogs can have small traffic.
I have had problems with them showing trojan’s on my blog and their reply was that these companies use flash for their ads and when they get approved by Adbrite they then change their flash.
The ads also do not always match up. In the year I have been using them I have never had one wrestling, music, web hosting or football related ad (my four sites).