Shame on me. I promised not to do it again but I gave in and succumbed to trying yet another ad network for the small publishers. This time, the choice was ADSDAQ, carefully chosen after reading a bunch of reviews and feedback.
The network claims to be able to help you improve your site’s monetization significantly over what you’re usually getting from other ad networks. The Google AdSense program is repeatedly mentioned as a known low-paying alternative, and ADSDAQ markets themselves as the little guy’s better alternative.
Fine. I start the registration sign-up and after a few screens, I’m prompted with the following mindblowing graphic, showing the business plan of these people is based on the assumption that your puny little site is only making $0.50 CPM.
At this point, I wonder if there’s any point continuing the registration process. Without going into any details on what eCPM I make from my sites through AdSense, I guess you will agree that $0.50 is a joke. Any half-decent site can do much, much better than this. In fact, such low CPMs can only be expected from sites that are smart priced or extremely poorly optimized in terms of ad placements, something that ADSDAQ shouldn’t automatically assume about all sites that are signing up.
Still, I continue the registration, thinking that I’ll decide later what CPM to ask for. At the very last stage of the registration, in the tags generation section, here’s what pops up: ‘Put Ad Tags on pages that receive traffic from the United States. Non-US impressions will be sent to your Backup Tags until they are supported in the future.‘ This was the point where I abandoned the screen and will never go back. To be told only after having completed the registration and after having entered contact and site details into their system that I’ll be doing a bit more than $0.50 CPM for US traffic – that was the biggest joke of all.
To conclude, I should have known better. I should have known that no ad networks tailored to smaller publishers are seriously thinking and able to monetize anything else but porn, warez, link farming sites and the likes. For the small publisher with quality sites there’s pretty much no other choice than staying with Google AdSense until the traffic builds up to be able to sell directly or join larger, reputable networks.
