AdBrite Review - Malware, Poor Customer Service, Low Revenue and payout Scam This is a review of AdBrite on a medium size website (Attracting over 1 million views per month, of which 500,000+ are Unique) over a period of 3 months as an Adsense Alternative Background We joined AdBrite after receiving many emails from advertisers wanting to directly publish their ads on our site and pay directly. As this was a time consuming process, we decided we wanted a third party to handle selling our ad space for us to try and increase our income beyond what Google Adsense could achieve. We read about AdBrite, and how advertisers could directly bid for specific ad spots on our page. We assumed with this approach, we could run network ads and if a specific company wanted to put their banner on our site for a specific audience (say just American Visitors), AdBrite would take care of payment, geo-targeting and running the ad on our site. So off we went, and signed up for AdBrite knowing we could afford to due to recent earnings with Google Adsense to take a chance with AdBrite and see what could be achieved. Signup was easy, took less than 5 minutes however the first problem we came across is their ancient paying system. Instead of a bank transfer, or PayPal which are standard across the market, they wanted to use a Bank Cheque written in US Dollars sent via post. Not a big problem if your American, but as we were based in Europe it meant having a cheque air mailed to us and then cashed into a bank (which cost money as its classed as a foreign cheque, and then they give a terrible exchange rate because they can). We got past this hoping the reward would be worth the inconvenience. Once signed up, we setup our three Ad Zones, named them nicely and placed the code on our site. All was good at this stage and we began waiting to see how this would turn out and if we found a way to increase our earnings with direct sales for banners on our site. However, over the course of our 3-month trial with them, we ran into the following problems: Malware Scare At one point during our first month with them Google and Norton Web Security flagged our site as producing malware. After investigation we found AdBrite have had a bad Advertiser putting adverts on our site, which contained malware. This not only put our trusted readers at risk, but also got our site blocked from Google Searches and from Facebook for over a day killing our viewers by 80% for 2 days until we could resolve this. An email to them about this resulted in a reply a week later saying they will look into that. By this point, we had cleaned it up ourselves. When you trust an Ad Provider to place adverts on your site, you would assume they would do basic checks on the Ad’s being run, and not allow a malware provider onto the service. Any site running AdBrite runs the risk with nothing they can do about it until after the event. This in turn cripples the site in the long run, with missing out on new members, loss of revenue for that time period from other revenue streams like Affiliate links and In-Text Ad Providers. Invalid clicks from a Certain IP Another point during our AdBrite experience we got an email from them asking us to block a certain IP from our site due to invalid clicks (which as we used Cloudflare, wasn’t a problem to do). This however was very strange, since when does an Ad Provider ask us to block an IP? Surely if this bot or system on that IP is causing a problem they should just block it on their ad serving server and not ask webmasters to do it for them. To be honest, at this point I should have realized they really are not qualified for their job, however at the time I decided to help them as I was still hoping our new business relationship with them would work in the long time. The Earnings After displaying 3.6 million page views with 3 adverts on them, we managed to clock up… wait for it…. And incredible $203.15 dollars! To put that into prospective, over the same period with Adsense, we would have easily way more. Those earnings are quite frankly beyond awful. I believe there are a few reasons for this: * Poor quality adverts, which never matched any of the users interests. I was getting adverts for woman’s clothing when I was male, with little interest in clothes never browsing a clothes website. * Adverts that did not load half the time. Many times when viewing our site you would get the loading for over 30 seconds and then the advert would just time out. Its like their Ad-Server just gave up and couldn’t handle loading a few adverts here and there. * Adverts that clearly looked like scams, for example ‘You are the 1,000,000 viewer, click here to claim your prize!!!’ * Massive profit margins, there is no way any company in the world would turn down 3.6million ad views for $200, they would think it’s the ultimate steal. I believe that’s how AdBrite stays in existence. The Final Straw Just a few days before the 3 month trial was due to end (and as you could guess, we were ready to dump then at this stage) we then got a lovely email from their Trust and Safety department confirming to us that after careful review they were closing our account and refusing to pay out the $200 dollars we had earnt due to invalid clicks. I do not even know how its possible with 3.6 million views and only 12k clicks that you could possible have invalid clicks. More like valid clicks not registering. As such, we feel entirely scammed by this company. They managed to sell 3.6 million ad spaces and make tons of money from them, and in return at the end of the time period it hasn’t cost them a cent as they just close down accounts if they have to pay out. We tried phoning them, emailing them demanding to know why and the cause and they have chosen to just ignore us. As such, I believe AdBrite are not fit for purpose and infact in my personal view seem like nothing but scammers. I would strongly suggest to any other webmaster looking at alternatives to Adsense to stay well clear of AdBrite. Of course, I’m open to hearing good comments if anyone has any? But from my point of view, never again will I trust them.
Sorry to hear it didn't work out. Reading this it did remind me to turn adblock off for digiex, so thats 1 positive out of it.