AdSense is probably the easiest way to generate revenue with your website but it’s certainly not the only way you can make money using contextualized advertising.
At the beginning of 2007, Google changed its Terms of Service to allow publishers to place other contextualized ad systems on the same pages as AdSense units. There’s just oneVibrant Media’s in-text service is a direct rival to Kontera. The company’s system works in a similar way: by picking keywords, turning them into links and producing floating ads when users mouse over. When Kontera was first rolled out it was probably fair to say that Vibrant Media’s Intellitxt system was at least as good, if not better. Their ads looked great (Kontera’s were a bit bland initially) and they turned up some very good ads. These days I’m not so sure. The people at Kontera have put so much work into improving their contextualization engine that Vibrant Media certainly doesn’t have an edge there. In fact, you can often find that the ads will match the keyword but the keywords won’t be the most relevant terms on the page. Nor can you define the link color, which is stuck on green, or be certain that an ad will contain restriction: those other systems’ ads can’t look like AdSense units.
That still leaves you a huge range of possibilities.
In this chapter, I’m going to look at some of the other programs that you could use — either instead of AdSense or as well as AdSense. I’ll explain how they work and how you can make them work with AdSense.
15.1 Vibrant Media’s Eye-Catching Ads
Fig. 15.1 Vibrant Media’s video ads grab your attention.
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