The Pitfalls of Ad Networks

The age of online advertising is constantly changing and in the past year we've seen a real shake-up in the way advertisers and publishers work together to get ad messages to readers and online users.

National companies are demanding more bang for their buck, so to speak, and are looking for greater visibility of their ad campaigns. Large publishing web sites, however, have not been able to fulfill these demands, so they came up with a model to spread ad messages across their web site and also share ad revenues with smaller publishers. The small publishers earn a percentage of the ad network's revenues in exchange for running ads on their site. While this may look like a win-win situation for all, I submit that as a small publisher there may be more pitfalls to ad networks than benefits.

Many of my sites and blogs have been approached to join ad networks, and at first, I was extremely flattered to be asked by huge brand-name companies to join them. But then I took a look at the contracts and I started to see things a little differently. Read more.