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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of alternatives to Adsense but none of them are comparable.

They all take a huge dive in RPM, are iffy with UX and security and tend to not last long.

My personal account was locked out of Adsense in the same way years back. A violation every 5 months or so, which I always "corrected." Then one day it's just off. I respond and eventually Adsense is restored. Then a few weeks later, closed and banned.

And it's been that way since. No recourse. Just ... shut out.

This was a site with 100% user-generated content. If Google can't handle something like that, well ...

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> There are plenty of alternatives to Adsense but none of them are comparable.

There are two companies that could have helped minimize Adsense's monopoly but decided not to: Microsoft and Facebook.

Facebook had a strong display ad product for a while, Audience Network, but they shut that down Q1 this year for web traffic. Only app ads now.

I don't think it's the job of private actors to stop a monopoly from forming. Google's acquisition of double-click should have never been approved by the SEC.

>Google's acquisition of double-click should have never been approved by the SEC.

It seems obvious in hindsight that the acquisition would kill competition but at the time, it didn't seem so. Like right now, in hindsight, Facebook's acquisition of instagram should be blocked - at the time it looked risky.

Same with Google's acquisition of youtube.

There are plenty of alternatives to Adsense but none of them are comparable.

Which is why I stated that they should be run secondary to AdSense. At least they'd be ready to go when Google decided to shut Techdirt down.

Something is better than nothing.

Have you done this? I've run remnant alternatives and quite honestly the RPMs almost make it pointless.

I'm talking $0.01 - $0.05 CPM when Adsense was averaging ~ $3

You're saying you only made 5 cents after generating a thousand clicks on an ad?

In this situation, CPM is likely based on impressions, not clicks.

Most of the also-run ad networks do that, yes.

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