My Experiences with Adbrite
Adbrite. According to their website, they serve over 614 million impressions per day across almost 30k sites. They boost a pretty impressive list of clients that they work with: Alexa, Break.com and Excite. Adbrite was started by Philip Kaplan, otherwise known as "Pud", who started the Fuckedcompany.com website, amongst many others.
Maybe I just had a bad run with Adbrite, but I would put them at the very bottom of my list for companies that I would want to spend advertising dollars on. As a matter of fact, I would give them my "Golden Mongoloid" award for absolute worst value for companies that I have spent advertising dollars through.
Not only that, but they have cost me a significant amount of money as well due to the fact that they have an agreement with Overture to act as one of Overture's "partner sites." Because of this, I've received more worthless traffic than I care to think about. Anytime I see a click sent from Overture UK that was generated from an Adbrite partner site, I cringe, cause I know that there is no way in hell that this traffic will actually convert for me. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of clicks and not one conversion. Considering that my normal conversion rate is 1 out of 15-20 clicks for a lead, this is incredibly bad. Considering that the sites which are sending this traffic are completely unrelated to my niche, and are normally blogs that have one, maybe two posts on them, I can't be surprised. Adbrite was the reason that we shut down our Overture UK campaigns.
In regards to actually spending money at Adbrite, again, this was a case of absolutely zero conversions. Maybe buying traffic through Adbrite works for some people, but it certainly didn't work for us. When I compare the traffic generated by Google Adwords / MSN Adcenter, and compare it with Adbrite traffic, there is absolutely no comparison. Many conversions vs. no conversions. Sure, Adwords clicks may be more expensive, but it all comes down to Return on Investment, no cost per click. Our return on Investment was -100% through Adbrite, so we quickly switched off our campaigns there and vowed to never spend advertising dollars through Adbrite again.
The third reason I don't like Adbrite? Their interstitial ads. So unbelievably intrusive and annoying, and these ads cause my browser to crash. If a site that I am visiting has these interstitial ads, then I vow never to return to that site again. Ever.
Adbrite has some fairly major venture capital backing the company, but in my opinion, this is a company that I could never do business with again. In my line of work, it all comes down to your ROI, and -100% doesn't cut it.
Filed under: Making Money Online | Internet Companies | General Knowledge