Google AdSense is a popular tool for making money online through your website or blog through adverts, but it’s not the only choice out there. There are lots of Adsense alternatives you might want to check out.
Whether you’ve not yet set up an AdSense account, you’ve had trouble getting it approved, or you’d like to diversify your income, there are many different alternative advertising programs that offer great features and allow you to make additional income from your website.
What is Google Adsense?
If you weren’t aware, Adsense is an advertising program operated by Google. Launched in 2003, it is one of the most popular advertisement networks online for bloggers and webmasters looking to monetize their websites.
You’ve probably seen them all over the web. They look a little something like this:
Which Type of Website Is Best for Adsense?
Any type of website can use Google AdSense. But there are some types that are better suited to running Adsense ads on them
Let’s take a quick look at which types of websites are best for Adsense:
- Blogs – one of the most common ones. If you are a blogger and you are consistently publishing high-quality content to an audience, ads may be a great way to monetize your content.
- Forums – Instead of writing blog posts, forums are a great way for people to interact around a topic, whilst also generating some Adsense revenue.
- Free Online Tool – If you run a site that offers a free tool or service, one way to offset the costs is with ads.
The takeaway here is that any website that is getting regular traffic is well suited for Adsense.
But what if you don’t want to use Adsense ads on your site?
Why Should I Look for Alternatives to Adsense?
Google Adsense has been one of the leading ways for bloggers to make money from their sites for many years.
In fact, with the right niche, good content and engaged audience, your site can generate a good amount of revenue. Just check out this screenshot of AdSense earnings:
But that doesn’t mean that it is the only choice.
There are many alternatives out there (21 in fact) and reasons to look for alternative advertising platforms.
Maybe you already have an Adsense account but you want to diversify your income streams. Or maybe you want to keep Adsense ads running and add some additional streams.
Maybe again you are looking to earn more money from your ad space than you are currently earning with Adsense.
But where do you start? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered:
Best Google AdSense Alternatives
Let’s take a look at some of these Google AdSense alternatives to find out more about how you can further monetize your website or blog:
Let’s explore these in more detail.
1. Ezoic
Ezoic is an end-to-end platform that enables publishers to add display ads to any pages on their site. Ezoic uses proprietary artificial intelligence that tailors the ad experience down to a visitor-by-visitor basis, ensuring that each visitor only gets targeted with the amount, location, and size of ads that they’re most receptive to.
Because Ezoic is a Certified Google Publishing Partner, publishers have access to Google’s coveted AdX portfolio of advertising partners. AdX can’t be accessed through Google Adsense, this premier level of advertisers means publishers get higher paying ads displayed on their site.
Ezoic now offers ways to add videos to your site created from the content already on your website through two new products called Flickify & Humix. Video is a rapidly growing part of advertising revenue for publishers.
Flickify is an easy-to-use tool that allows publishers to copy and paste their text content and convert it into a modifiable video that can be embedded into your existing content, boosting ad revenue and improving the user experience.
Videos created in Flickify are hosted on the Humix video platform (instead of YouTube), which allows the publishers to keep more of the ad revenue on each video play. YouTube has strict requirements before your channel can be monetized, such as subscriber and video view time minimums which can take years to achieve. With Humix, publishers can be monetized from day one.
2. Media.net
Media.net is a direct AdSense competitor run by Yahoo and Bing. It is one of the world’s largest contextual ad networks and is used by household names all over the world.
Its contextual ads allow you to monetize your content with exclusive access to searches from the Yahoo! Bing network. The marketplace gives you access to content-driven publishers, so you can maximize your ad revenue and take advantage of a huge search market.
Media.net was the first to develop a server-side header bidding platform, which can be fully managed, allowing you to make the most of programmatic display with minimal effort.
Suggested reading: Bing Webmaster Tools: The Complete Step-By-Step Guide.
3. PropellerAds
PropellerAds is a large ad network that offers a range of adverts like banners, sponsored links, push notifications, and allows you to reach 1 billion users.
The self-serve platform is easy to use with a simplified ad creator that allows you to get your campaigns live with minimal hassle. With lots of targeting options and real-time performance measurement, you can work reactively to improve your campaigns.
It also features automated ad optimization, where your settings are fine-tuned by AI, giving you the best number of conversions for each ad without manual effort.
4. Amazon Native Shopping Ads
Bloggers and other site owners have been using Amazon’s affiliate program to generate additional revenue for a long time, but Amazon Native Shopping Ads offer another high-reward way to monetize your website.
Similar to AdSense ads, Amazon Native Shopping Ads are contextual, so they display relevant products based on the page content and keywords. If a user goes on to make a purchase after clicking on the ad, you get a commission from this sale, regardless of whether it was for the item that was clicked on.
Amazon is the top ecommerce site in the world, and their conversion rate is much higher than pretty much any other ecommerce competitor. You can leverage this unrivalled traffic and conversion rate for passive revenue with very little effort.
5. Adsterra
Adsterra is a leading advertising and monetization platform providing a unique Partner Care program for brands, media agencies, and individual buyers and sellers.
As a great Adsense alternative, Adsterra offers a beginner- and vertical-friendly policy, fast moderation, innovative targeting features, and in-house optimization solutions like Custom Bid, CPA Goal, and Smart CPM.
They specialize in VPN, utilities, cleaners, mobile subscriptions, iGaming, ecommerce, dating, and finance verticals. Adsterra stands out by direct traffic from 248 GEOs and high-converting ad formats, including their proprietary dynamic and customizable Social Bar ads.
Adsterra has been a leader in the AdTech industry since 2013, known and respected by brands, apps, CPA and ad networks, affiliate marketers, start-up founders, and web and social traffic owners.
6. Adversal
Adversal is a self-serve advertising platform that allows you to get your ads set up in just a few minutes.
Its smart interface allows you to start, stop, and pause campaigns, making it easy and intuitive to use. Once you’ve set everything up, you can just leave it to do the work.
It’s worth noting that to be eligible for Adversal, your site must have its own domain name, have at least 50,000 pageviews per month, and shouldn’t be restricted by a login.
7. Sovrn //Commerce (Formerly VigLink)
Sovrn //Commerce delivers revenue to publishers through content-driven-commerce with leverage, insight, and automation.
By converting regular product links into affiliate links, Sovrn //Commerce allows you to generate passive revenue from clicks and resulting sales.
The monetization tools create competition among advertisers for your traffic, allowing you to get the best price. In-depth insights show you which products and advertisers earn you the most money so you can optimize your performance. Automation of the process means that you can focus on creating great content instead of tracking affiliate revenue.
And there is also Meridian from Sovrn.com, which is a CPM ad network that pays publishers per impression. This means that you receive money whenever your ad is served, regardless of whether or not it is clicked.
8. Skimlinks
Skimlinks automates affiliation of your commerce content, allowing you to focus on running your website without worrying about setting up affiliate links.
By automatically updating your commerce content with affiliate links, this tool is able to enhance all of your commerce strategies, including website, mobile, social media and email.
Joining Skimlinks gives you direct access to a global network of 48,500 merchants and 50 demand partners. You can also find merchants that offer special commissions to Skimlinks’ publishers through the VIP and Preferred Partner Program.
9. Monumetric
Formerly The Blogger Network, Monumetric is a full-service ad revenue partner, allowing you to increase your site’s revenue while preserving the best user experience for your visitors.
They use CPM rather than CPC, so you get paid for every impression, and their pay rates are one of the best for CPM campaigns. Revenue is often reported to be much higher than AdSense, making this a great choice for increasing your passive income.
However, the minimum traffic requirement is 10k monthly views, and there’s a 99% setup fee for sites with between 10k and 80k views, so you’ll need to be confident that you can drive enough traffic to make the investment worthwhile.
10. InfoLinks
Infolinks is a global advertising platform that aims to deliver brand messages to engaged users.
The ads are fully customizable and offer a unique placement to improve click-through rate without disturbing the look and feel of the website. By using a smart algorithm to determine relevance and intent, allowing them to deliver relevant ads at optimized moments.
Infolinks supports a marketplace of over 100,000 websites operating in 128 countries and can be integrated into a website in just a few minutes.
11. Adnimation
Adnimation is a Google Certified Publishing Partner (GCPP) that helps publishers maximize their website’s ad revenue.
It works with hundreds of publishers in the US and worldwide, using a combination of advanced technology and professional human touch to increase revenue while maintaining the best possible user experience.
As a Google-certified partner, Adnimation utilizes Google AdX, Google’s premium marketplace, together with the industry’s top demand partners to leverage higher prices for its publishers.
Adnimation is also uniquely transparent. In contrast to the industry standard of disclosing only net revenue to publishers, Adnimation offers comprehensive and transparent revenue reports. These include gross revenue, equipping publishers with a complete understanding of their earnings.
12. ylliX
Some people look for alternatives to Google AdSense for better pay rates, and ylliX definitely fits the bill. It’s an advertising network offering various ad types for both desktop and mobile, including popunder ads, mobile redirects, sliders, layer ads, and full-page ads.
It offers instant account approval, fair rates, detailed reports, daily payments, and 100% fill rates, as well as precise campaign targeting and a self-serve platform that gives you complete control of your campaigns. Traffic comes from verified sources to ensure quality and increase conversions, and publishers don’t pay a thing for using ylliX.
They also offer a generous referral program, paying up to $100 for each new active publisher or advertiser you refer, plus 2% of their lifetime earnings or spend.
13. Evadav
Evadav is an advertising network focusing on push notifications, but they also provide many ad options, including banners, video sliders, and native ads for both desktop and mobile.
When a user subscribes to your push notification system, they remain connected to your account, earning you a constant daily income from their signup. Evadav also has a referral program that pays you 5% of the revenue made by referred publishers, bringing you even more passive income with very little work.
All websites are approved to ensure that adverts are brand-safe, so you benefit from high-quality traffic and trustworthy adverts.
14. PopCash
PopCash is a popunder network that offers worldwide coverage, with 850 million monthly visitors and 50,000 active publishers.
You can get your campaigns started quickly with just a $5 deposit and fast approval. Detailed statistics and targeting features allow you to constantly improve the performance of your ads. Publishers can start earning additional revenue in just a few minutes, implementing the popunder code to the desired pages and submitting their domain for review.
PopCash can be implemented alongside AdSense or other advertising options, allowing you to make the most of your websites income stream potential.
15. PopAds
As the name suggests, PopAds specialize in delivering popunder adverts, claiming to be the best-paying advertising network for this type of ad.
Their network includes advertisers from more than 50 countries, and they offer a referral scheme for both advertisers and publishers. There are lots of targeting options to allow you to improve your campaigns, and you have full control of what you want to pay.
It uses a state-of-the-art bidding system that allows you to choose how much you want to pay for each popunder. The lower the bid, the less traffic you’ll get. All publisher sites are reviewed by humans to ensure that they meet certain quality measures.
16. RevContent
RevContent helps advertisers to leverage a highly engaged audience through technology and partnerships with some of the world’s largest media brands.
It’s a Native Ads Network, offering some of the highest quality adverts and approval processes in the industry, so you can be sure that your traffic is high quality and engaged. The ads just look like related articles, making them blend well with your website and presenting minimal disruption to your design and improving clickthrough rates.
They offer a great pay rate for clicks, and you can also benefit from their referral program. In fact, if you sign up through a referral link, Revcontent will approve you faster and pay you more.
17. SHE Media
SHE Media‘s partner network specializes in monetizing blogs and websites aimed at a female audience.
Created by and for women, the SHE Media Partner Network sees 50+ million unique visitors per month, offering publishers a great audience. Through its flagship websites like SheKnows.com and #BlogHer, and key programs including #Femvertising and Voices of the Year, the network aims to create a community of premium content for women across every age and life stage.
As well as advertising, they also offer sponsored posts and paid product reviews, giving publishers even more options for great content and monetization.
18. AdRecover
Adblock has caused many issues for those who rely on advertising revenue. AdRecover aims to overturn this by partnering with adblock providers to serve static, non-intrusive, UX-compliant ads to people who use these ad blockers.
This means that you’ll be able to access highly discerning and hard-to-reach users that normally wouldn’t be available due to their use of ad blockers.
For publishers, your daily traffic needs to include at least 10k of visitors that are using adblock for you to be accepted. You’ll need to install AdRecover for about a week so your traffic can be analyzed before your site is approved.
19. MadAds Media
Working with over 100 ad networks and the internet’s highest-profile brand advertisers, MadAds offers great fill rates and high-quality traffic.
There are a variety of ad campaigns available, including CPC, CPM, CPA, and CPL, making it one of the most versatile alternatives to Adsense. You also have the ability to work with optimization specialists to ensure that your ad positioning and placement yields the highest revenue possible.
You need at least 10,000 daily pageviews and your site must be family-friendly and well designed for it to be accepted.
20. Bidvertiser
Bidvertiser is a direct advertising network that helps to find the best match between advertisers and publishers.
By using pre-screened traffic sources that are aimed at generating conversions, Bidvertiser allows you to make the most out of your ads. All of the traffic is fully segmented to control and optimize your ad targeting.
It also offers a referral program that pays for referrals of both advertisers and publishers, meaning that your ad network will continue to bring in passive revenue.
21. BuySellAds
BuySellAds is a platform that sells advertising space on your website for you. While you have control over what your ad space is worth, it’s important to avoid pricing yourself out of the market.
With advertising channels such as display, native performance, sponsored content, and emails, BuySellAds offers respectful, brand-safe placements instead of invasive or distracting ads. By serving ads to their network of highly qualified audiences, you get the most out of every impression.
When you submit your site for approval, it is reviewed for quality. Only high-quality English-language sites with a minimum of 100,000 pageviews per month are accepted.
22. AdClickMedia
AdClickMedia is a digital advertising company that offers CPM & PPC advertising solutions for advertisers and website owners worldwide.
It boasts over 6,200 publishers, 113 email list partners and 110 million monthly views, so you can benefit from a wide audience. They also offer subscription advertising, allowing you to display your ads on thousands of influential blogs and sites from just $49/month.
There are no minimum traffic requirements, making it a great option for newer sites or those with fewer visitors to increase their revenue.
Sidenote: Youtube Monetization Alternatives
If you use video content, don’t forget about YouTube monetization.
Generally, people integrate their YouTube channel with Google AdSense in order to earn ad revenue. But you can also use the Adsense alternatives for Youtube mentioned below.
These alternative networks are an effective way to monetize your video content:
- AdRev – This alternative helps to promote your YouTube channel as well as protect your video content. You can easily monitor your earnings and the minimum payout is $10 via PayPal.
- Freedom – This integrates with your YouTube channel with multiple platforms as well as connecting you with other creators to boost your business. There are no contracts and there’s no minimum payout via PayPal.
- Fullscreen Media – This global network serves brand opportunities to secure deals that fit your content using a variety of ad formats. There is a $50 threshold before you can get a payout.
- Maker Studio – This alternative is a digital network that is integrated with the Disney network to boost your channel through promotional opportunities. There is zero commitment to join and payments are sent via PayPal.
- Machinima – This aims to deliver your content to a targeted audience as well as using brands to widely distribute content. Payment is via PayPal, but there is a 3 years contract to join the service.
Which Adsense Alternative is Best?
So which Adsense alternative is best for your website or blog?
Well, the answer is: it depends. But if you want to maximize your ad earnings, you might want to consider Mediavine.
Mediavine is a private AdSense alternative that only accepts high-quality sites and those with a minimum of 30,000 pageviews or 25,000 sessions a month.
They manage your ad server, helping you optimize placements of ads, putting in better price controls, removing middlemen and working directly with advertisers on your behalf.
Due to them not just accepting anyone, they are able to negotiate better deals and most sites see an increase in earnings when using Mediavine when compared to AdSense.
Here are a few good resources about them:
When it comes to switching ad networks, it’s always worth experimenting to see which performs best for your site before fully moving over to an Adsense alternative.
Summary
AdSense may be one of the most well-known methods of monetizing your website. There are plenty of alternatives to Google AdSense, though you’d want to try if you’re not getting the results you want or you’re looking to diversify your revenue streams.
Head of Content at Kinsta and Content Marketing Consultant for WordPress plugin developers. Connect with Matteo on Twitter.
Hi Mateo – Laurent again;) Went through this post and was actually surprised not to see the Facebook Audience Network as a monetization alternative to adsense.
Less known, it’s still quite a powerful platform that gives access to premium advertisers.
All the best!
I used to use OIO Publisher on a lot of my sites, but I came back to it recently and noticed that it doesn’t display ads in Firefox or Chrome…it seems to be flash-based and those browsers don’t really like Flash anymore.
Is there a way around it?
Great article!
I’m looking for an ad network that delivers politically-oriented ads, similar to what you see on Daily Kos. If I add ads (heh) back to my site, I want them to be related to our niche, and not random stuff. Also, I want to manage the ad placement, and not have to give back-end access to someone else.
Any thoughts on an ad network that could deliver that finely-tuned a set of ads?
as affiliate I worked with many cpa network like maxbounty, peerfly, mostcpa, clickdealr, I could say easily that you should focus on one network in one vertical only.
I suggest to add alternatives to AdSense instead of replacing AdSense. The real-time competition can increase CPM a lot! There are different services nowadays online that can integrate many alternative networks to compete with AdSense. For me PapayAds is the one which performed the best increasing 3x usual AdSense revenue. They require minimum traffic to set up but it is worth trying to contact them.
thanks for sharing.
Currently, I’m using adsterra but it is not giving me much revenue even my traffic is better some times it stops placing ads
I have noticed that customer support has decreased in the past year as Taboola has grown. It sometimes takes four days or more for a campaign to be approved. It used to be immediate and always within 24 hours.
I have roughly 30k monthly sessions, vast majority from US. I’m probably still 4-5 months away from reaching Mediavines requirements, at current growth rate.
Currently I have Adsense (for about a year) and my RPM hovers between $1.50 – $1.80. I tried Media.net and it was way worse around $.50. I applied for Monumetric 3 months ago and still have not heard from them. I’ve emailed several times and not heard back.
Is there any other good options for me? I’d like to increase my RPM at least a little bit. Sub $2 is just too low, but I can’t find an other viable option.
Hi Jeffrey, I don’t have any direct experience, but the blogs/channels that I read tend to recommend Ezoic as an alternative to Adsense.
Glad you asked Brian. I saw your comment because I’m also wondering about Ezoic…and Foremedia.
You missed mentioning Adcash, who is converting best for me so far and has the ad formats I need with capping options, antiadblock etc. And you mentioned Sovrn who banned whole geos with “Access Denied”. As Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey etc.
Please add to your article, that it’s for the UK, USA publishers only! Thanks in advance!
Excellent content.. This is really appreciable work. Very informative post.
Thanks dear.
I found this information very useful. I have been using several advertising networks for some years and I can say that Propellerads is at the top. I also use pop under ads from Popunderstar that have an unique type of tab-under integration that improves UX by delivering ads on user interaction with an in-site link which is completely SEO safe unlike traditional pop integrations.