Monetizing Your Proxy

Realistically this is what all us webmasters are here for! Regarding monetizing a proxy there are many different approaches you can take. Listed below is a set of well knows advertisers that allow for their ads to be placed on your proxy. Be sure to read their TOS though as some only allow ads in certain places and not on proxied pages.

Google Adsense is seen to be the primary choice for advertising for most publishers. Good money can be made via Adsense though its ads can only be placed on your main index page and sub pages. Proxied pages cannot display Adsense ads due to Google’s strict TOS. This is due to the fact that as advertisers maybe mistaken as endorsing any content your visitors might browse to with your proxy.

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is similar to Google Adsense in many ways hough fairly new to the advertising market. YPN is known for its strict entrance requirements so therefore i do not actually recommend the use of YPN for your proxy. You need large amounts of consistent traffic and until recent non US accounts with inconsistent traffic have been known to have been banned from the program.

For use as a secondary revenue on your proxy AdBrite is the way to go. Adbrite officially allows you to use thier ads on proxied pages. Although the eCPM may be low, compared to other methods it can bring in a nice revenue source. It may be useful to change the ad colors although that time could be better spent.

Adversal is a widely used advertising network that provides pop-ups and pop-unders to visitors. This type of advertising is however very unpopular with visitors, I tested it for a couple days out of a month on my more established proxy websites - any longer and I would probably start losing visitors. Typically your visitors dont want to be pestered by popups, I personally dont like unexpected windows opening. You have to weigh up the cost of inconvenience versus the normally low profit.

 

Ad Placement
The typical placement of ads is two boxes above the URL bar and a 728×90 banner ad underneath. The best that researchers have found was a 468×60 banner above the URL bar and a box between the proxy options and the go button. I have also tried this setup without the banner above the URL box and my clicks went down by no more than 5 out of 200 so if you want user satisfaction take the 468×60 banner ad away.

On a final note, be sure to experiment with diffrent publishing networks though do make sure that they allow for their ads to be placed on a proxy. If you use a diffrent publisher feel free to contribute to this post by leaving a comment with your experiences. Thank you for reading.