Every couple months I get bored of just using Google AdSense and Amazon ads on my blogs. It seems everyday a new ad network pops up with promises of making publishers rich. Recently I have received offers or heard about a few new programs that caught my attention.

So far none of them have made me rich, all of them were interesting, and all of them had some definite strengths and weaknesses.

Pepperjam Network

Pros

• Easy way of creating an ad block that will rotate through any of the advertisers whose campaigns you belong to.
• They have an affiliate program that let’s you earn money if other people sign up through your link.

Cons

• Reporting screens only show successful transactions/leads but not impressions so you have no idea if reporting is working unless you see it actually working.
• Low 1-Month EPCs. Almost all of the listed ones are under $1 with most of them in the $0.10 to $0.30 range which is pretty unimpressive.

Update: A few people have clicked through the affiliate link above which has updated the stats on Pepperjam reports.  It shows clicks but not impressions on the main dashboard.  If you look at the SID or Transaction Summer screen, it is reporting impressions there.  But it only seems to report them when you get an actual click or I have something wrong on the original ad block I was testing.

ScribeFire QuickAds

Pros

• Pulls ads from a variety of sources and has an algorithm to display the ads that should give the highest payout for your content.
• Stats update throughout the day with a couple hour lag time.

Cons

• Limited amount of ad sizes. The big 3 are covered, 728X90, 300X250, and 160X600 but no 468X60 or 125X125 or any of the other fairly popular formats.
• Almost all of the ads displayed on my site were from ShoppingAds.com which I knew from prior testing doesn’t work well on the site I was testing with. If that was the ad they expected to make the most on my site, that was a bad sign. I want to try it on a more product related blog soon to see if it performs better there.

PerformancingAds

Pros

• I have been thinking about trying to sell the 125X125 ads for a little while now but haven’t taken the time to get organized about contacting potential advertisers. This provides an entry into that form of advertising.
• The ads are bought on a weekly basis which seems like it would be nice if I were looking to advertise somewhere. For a smaller commitment you can test running an ad on a site. That could encourage more advertisers to use the service which should help publishers make more money.
• You set your own weekly price.
• You can reject any advertisers within 24 hours.

Cons

• They provide the option for no following the links but I still wonder if there will be some kind of Google backlash like the whole Text-Link-Ads issue a while back.
• There is no way to manually accept an offer. You have to wait the 24 hours that you have to reject the offer before the ad will go live.
• There are very few sites in the program.  But the program is very new so that will change if the program does well.

As you can probably tell by the number of bullet points, I’m preferring the concept of the PerformancingAds.  It satisfies an advertising model that I was interested in looking into and it handles it fairly cleanly and I don’t know of any other program that competes in that same advertising niche.  The other two seem to compete in a much more crowded arena that already has some fairly established players.

Have you heard of any other advertising programs that seem to be doing something new and unique?