Right now there is a major discussion brewing over the battle between Adbrite vs Adsense. People want to know which advertising network is best for monetizing a website such as a blog, forum, or authority directory. For a long time, AdSense would have won out based solely on its size and breadth of options, but more and more people are starting to second guess their initial opinions.

Adbrite vs Adsense – The Basics

To start with, let’s look at what each ad network provides its users. Adsense has been around the longest and definitely has the largest network of publishers and advertisers as an offshoot of AdWords, the world’s largest advertising platform. A quick search through blogs, forums, and IM sites will show you that it still remains a strong favourite.

It is considered extremely easy to use and trustworthy as it is backed by Google – a publicly traded company with relatively transparency. There are downsides to AdSense, however. You can only place three ad blocks per page, severely limiting your overall impressions for any one page. You can also only get your checked mailed out in $100 or higher increments, a real killjoy for smaller site owners.

Additionally, impressions are meaningless as all ads are based on CPC impressions. That means they won’t generate any revenue if ads are not clicked.

On the other side of the Adbrite vs Adsense argument lays Adbrite, the slightly smaller company that has just as trustworthy of a reputation. Many marketers have been using Adbrite for some time now and will swear by their product. Their advertising options come in a number of different formats, including CPM and CPC. You can use in-text ads as well as full page ads to show between content pages (similar to newspaper sites). You can also choose to have checks mailed out at smaller, $5 increments, so you won’t need to wait for months when you start a new account and are building traffic.

Adbrite vs Adsense – Income Breakdown

To date, there is no single resource that will show you how much each site will make you, and for the most part, the context analysis for each of the services is pretty solid. Neither will fail to place ads that relate directly to your content, thus giving your readers something they actually want to click on. AdSense does have comparably stringent guidelines for site approval and integration, however, going along with their limitation of how many ads you can post.

Google is originally an experience service. They like their advertising revenue just fine, but they also want to provide readers with the information they’re looking for, so they tend to dislike excess advertising. On the other side of the Adbrite vs Adsense argument, Adbrite is a strictly advertising platform with lots of major clients and companies signing on to post their ads.

That means that you have full control of how much advertising appears on your site. Furthermore, you can choose to opt for strictly impression based advertising on an AdBrite account, allowing you to get paid just for the visitors that reach your site. For some niches, this form of advertising can be much more profitable.

In the end, the issue of Adbrite vs Adsense comes down to which site works best for your needs. In terms of raw options and ease of use, AdBrite comes out on top, but just barely. AdSense is fantastic as well for a number of reasons, but expect to be slightly more limited and have to deal with more oversight than if you opted for the other, more independent company.