Earn Money by Advertising with AdBrite

AdBrite (http://www.adbrite.com) was founded by Philip Kaplan and Gidon Wise in 2002. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California and backed by venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, and Mitsui Ventures. AdBrite runs an ad marketplace that includes more than 85,000 websites, making it second in size only to Google. AdBrite is the fifth-largest ad network by page views (ComScore, October 2008). AdBrite was recently named the #34 fastest-growing private companies in the United States, and the third-fasted growing advertising company, by Inc Magazine's annual Inc 5,000 survey.

AdBrite offers products similar to Google AdWords and AdSense but with some bright ideas. One of the differentiators is better transparency between the advertisers and the publishers. Take the cost-per-click (CPC) text ads as an example. The publishers are allowed to provide up to 50 keywords to help filter the ads. They can also disapprove advertisers and remove ads that are in conflicts with the publisher's interest or that don't fit well in the publisher's website.

In addition to the CPC text ads, AdBrite offers ads in other formats, such as, picture, banner image, in-text, and full-page ads. AdBrite's unique BritePic format allows you to monetize photos on your site with interactive text ads. Captions slide out, when the surfer hovers over the image. A menu is added at the lower left corner for the surfer to interact with the photo.

AdBrite added CPC based banner ads to its offering in November, 2008. The CPC model is much preferred by the advertisers thanks to its lower risk and better return of investment (ROI). The traditional cost-per-impression (CPM) banner ads incur potentially higher costs for the advertisers who pay for page impressions that have no guarantee of the surfer's interest in their products or services.

AdBrite's in-text ads are similar to Kontera's. I found many of AdBrite's in-text ads annoying due to their low relevance to the page content, though. In contrast, Kontera has done much better analysis of the page content and served ads that are contextually relevant. (For more information on Kontera in-text ads, read http://projectbko.blogspot.com/2008/11/kontera-in-text-ads.html)

AdBrite's full-page ads may be intrusive from the surfer's point of view. I heard there are places banning sites that use AdBrite due to their full page ads. It is reported that AdBrite is also listed on SpywareBlaster's blacklist. If you use SpywareBlaster, you will have to manually disable the blocking of AdBrite cookies.