For the vast majority of people reading this article, if I mention pay per click advertising for publishers, the first program that will come into their head will be Google Adsense simply because it is the most used one out there and made by Google. However, for a few of you, you may say Media.net, which can be considered the main competitor to Google Adsense. What Media.net delivers is a pay per click advertising program for publishers that takes advantage of the Yahoo and Bing network to show contextual adverts on your website. Therefore, it is Google versus Yahoo/Bing. Well, this rivalry can wait for another article. What you will read below are some of the main pros and cons to using Media.net from experimenting and using the PPC program on a few of my websites.
 
 

For: Rules are More Lenient

By ‘lenient’, what I mean is that the way you can show and place your adverts on your website is not as strict as Adsense is.  For example, a great place that produces one of the best click through rates on any website is in the sidebar by having the widget ‘sticky’ – this is when the widget still shows (sticks to the sidebar) regardless of the web user scrolling. Therefore, the exposure of the advert is at a maximum no matter where the web user is on the page.
For Adsense, this is a ‘no no’ which will get you banned. For Media.net, they welcome you to put a Media.net advert in a sticky widget which can significantly improve the revenue you produce: so much so that it may sway you from Adsense to Media.net.
 

Against: Payments in USD Currency

A problem with Media.net is that, no matter where you come from in the world, you have to accept all payments in dollars. For Americans, this is fine. However, for the rest of the world, this means awful exchange rates reducing the revenue you get at the end.
As well as this, it gives a little insight into Media.net as an advertising program. From only adopting a USD currency, it illustrates that are mainly targeting the US, unlike Adsense which offers a whole range of currencies to be paid in. Does this mean that those that use Media.net around the rest of the world may not do as well as an American created website with the same content/traffic when using Media.net?
 

Against: No Responsive Adverts

Considered a USP for Adsense, Media.net adverts are not yet responsive in the sense that they will change size based on the available area they have around them to utilise. For many websites that incorporate responsive themes to take advantage of mobile and tablet traffic, this is really not good news. This is because it means the adverts may only be truly optimised for one segmentation of web users viewing your website from a certain type of device.