Adbrite Dumped for Poor Performance

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

It's been a while since I have posted anything to this blog, mainly because I have been busy with other things. I have, however, still kept an eye on it, deleting spam when necessary, and monitoring how the advertising programs are performing. Today I made the decision to dump Adbrite.

A few months ago, Abrite revenue dropped to almost nothing (over a 10 times drop), and stayed there. I decided to give it a few months before deciding whether to continue using their service or not. Well, revenue has remained very low, and a pitiful few impressions are actually shown. Adbrite advertisements also had a poor click-through rate due to poor relevance. Hence, today I ditched that advertising network.

Ironically, round the time that the sudden unexplained revenue drop occured, I was about to ditch ADSDAQ for providing mostly ugly slimming and teeth whitening advertisements, and stick with Adbrite. Since then, has ADSDAQ improved dramatically, and filtering has removed the offending advertisements.

Acording to this article, someone else had a similar dramatic drop in revenue from Adbrite after they limited his accound for invalid clicks without any notification. This may have happened in my case, because the month prior to the revenue collapse my account recorded a few clicks (yes, performance was that poor). I am not going to bother checking if this is the case because I would still dump Adbrite for the following reasons:

• Failing to notify customers/partners of important events (such as restricting their account for alleged violations of terms and services) is completely unacceptable business practise to me, and
• If my account has been restricted for alleged "invalid clicks" which I did not make or cause, that would demonstrate a very poor invalid click detection algorithm on which I cannot rely, whether I am advertising, or providing advertising space.

So, either Adbrite has suddenly started performing very poorly, or their "invalid clicks" technology and business practises are unacceptable. Either way, they're gone.

I still haven't found an advertising network that I am satisfied with. ADSDAQ is okay, but has a low fill-rate (impressions per page view). Chitika works quite well, but caters only to visitors from the USA and Canada. Google Adsense was okay, until they disabled my account due to invalid click activity from an unknown source (I still have no idea who was responsible). I have just started testing Brinkin Banner Exchange, which combines concepts from both banner exchanges, and contextual advertising. It is an interesting concept; we shall see how it performs.

NOTE: Brinkin suddenly just disappeared a long while ago, and so I can only assume that it didn't make enough money in order to survive. (2012/03/9)

Comments (0) | 27 April 2010