AdBrite: Not So Fantastic

While I haven’t had any issues with them robbing me of nearly $60,000 (like Google did), I haven’t had a trouble-free experience. I’ll point out the good, then the bad, and you can decide for yourself.

First, Adbrite is a fairly new company, which I personally don’t see as a big negative. The first couple of years is when a company changes the most, and it’s usually good change based on input from the customers. AdBrite is definitely following this mold. I’ve been contacted a number of times over the phone and through email to share my thoughts on the service, the ads, new ideas for ads, and more. As someone that thinks outside of the box (though using cliches isn’t very out-of-the-box) I really enjoy sharing my $2 (I can never shut-up after just two pennies).

They are one of the only ad network offering interstitials, and they give quite a bit of control over who does and doesn’t advertise on your website, if you aren’t running the network ads, that is.

That’s about where things start to get muddy. I rarely visit my own website, so when I visit it for the first time in two weeks only to see interstitials that are blatant scams, it’s a big problem. This has happened quite a few times. I don’t understand why ad networks can’t seem to understand I want to earn a legitimate, morally-decent income running a website that is free to my users. I don’t care to spam them, encourage them to download Bonzi Buddy (old, but it really gets the point across huh?), or flash annoying ads in their face.

On top of questionable network ads, AdBrite is about the last website that you want to have to check on a daily basis. Over the period of a week you’re likely to only see sub-ten-second pageloads once or twice, if ever, and the funky layout of things isn’t exactly going to make you confess your undying love for the service anymore than you would for Myspace.

The last straw for me has been the sudden drop in my revenue. I was making a respectable amount, then I redesigned my website and managed to place the ads better. My clicks increased nearly twofold, but I couldn’t say the same for my earnings. Since I also did some streamlining, the number of pageloads dropped about 15%. That managed to take my earnings down about 50%. When I tried to contact AdBrite to see what had happened, they didn’t respond, and posting in an AdBrite controlled Yahoo Group only led for the post to be denied.

AdBrite has some serious growing up to do if they want to continue to prevail.

UPDATE: I’ve switched over to Google AdSense and my earnings have increased by 1000% on the same traffic, same ad spots. I think this shows clear superiority of the ability of Google to finagle the highest dollar for your ad space, at least in this case.