Forbes Network vs. Google Adsense

[hermione]

Does anyone here currently use the Forbes.com Business and Financial Blog Network for ads on your site? I was just wondering what the earnings are in comparison to Google Adsense. I know we're not allowed to give specific figures, but would you say it generally earns more or less than Google? And by how much percentage-wise?

Thanks!

[Titanic Dawn]

Hermione I also looked into the Forbes network. I talked to a couple of the sites that ran their ads and they all told me that they don't do a good job of selling out the inventory.

In the beginning Forbes told bloggers that they should have no problem selling out ads eventually because Forbes obviously has a lot of connections with top advertisers. So far this hasn't played out quite the way they planned.

[Greg]

Hermione, you could try running both.

I think Adsense is worth more than Forbes at the moment, but Forbes is a big name that knows how to sell ads (like Dawn said). So they could be much better in a few months.

If you do run both, please share your experiences!

[Dividend Growth Inve]

Actually even though its is called Forbes Network, the company through which the ads go through is named Adify. I don't really know what their relationship is however I can speak of my own personal experience.
I signed up for their CPM ads service in April and initially it was slow. I was fine with that. In May I made about 20% of what I made with Adsense and thus I was pretty happy that I have found a way to diversify my ad revenues ( add in 10-15% for kontera and I had increased revenues by simply signing up for new programs).
Then in june my adify revenues dropped by 90%, and there were a couple of days where there were no ads shown. In July my adify revenue fell from an already low figure by about 70%. I was thinking about using adsense in the unsold ad space, but then I learned that it is against google's TOS to do so. So I signed up for adsdaq and essentially I increased my revenues somewhat.

At the end of the day I would say stay away from adify. Their payout is at $100, and yet it is impossible to reach that amount. My earnings are about $60 this year with them. I don't think I'll ever reach the payout amount.

The problem with adify is that they don't have enough inventory and yet they have signed up a lot of publishers. This leads to blogs showing public service ads that don't earn any money and look pretty unprofessionally. That's why most bloggers are starting to put adify ads on the very bottom of their blogs instead of the very top.

One way to take advantage of Adify is instead of being a publisher is by becoming an advertiser. If you set a low CPM you can at least recoup your investment if you get new visitors.