It’s funny how many bloggers and website owners assume that Adsense would give them the best chance to make money online and get something back for their effort. There is no question that in certain situations Adsense could get you lots of money. You are going to have to be in the right niche and get a decent amount of traffic for that to work. But even if you make a killing with Adsense doesn’t mean you are getting the best deal from your ad space. That’s where OpenX comes into play. OpenX is an ad server that enables you to run your Google Adsense ads vs. affiliate and other types of ads and measure its performance against them to find out if you are getting the most out of your ads.

The fun part about OpenX is the fact that you can either host your ads yourself or join OpenX community and let others buy advertising space on your website. You can then let you ads compete and find out which ones work the best for your website. If you decided to run OpenX yourself, you can always grab affiliate banners from Commission Junction or LinkShare and pit them against Google ads.

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If you are a blogger or own a content portal, you have probably had to run ads on your website to monetize it and keep your business going. Many webmasters rely on Google Adsense to get their business going, and there is nothing wrong with that. As long as you know how to play your cards right and use your long-tail keywords to your advantage, there is a decent amount of money that can be earned from Google Adsense. Unfortunately, not all portal owners have the flexibility to play around with their content and change things around. If that is you, you’ve got a decision to make. You can either focus on third-party services such as Google to help you with your business, or you can use an ad-server system to serve your own ads.

Large content networks often partner up with Google and other display media services to sell their advertising space and generate revenue. Smaller websites do not necessarily have that option. Google Adsense does provide them with an easy way to monetize their website, and the fact that Google is working to take its Ad Exchange program to the next level is certainly good news for webmasters. (more…)