ValueClick Online Advertising Network

Posted on February 26, 2008

Representing over 15.000 publishers and hundreds of advertisers, ValueClick Media is a large and well-respected advertising network.

It was created when ValueClick Media finished acquiring FastClick Media about a year and a half ago, and thereby gained the capacity for some new features and options, as well as an increased network of advertisers and publishers.

In addition to CPMs, ValueClick offers its users some affiliate marketing opportunities, as well as referral incentives. With many different ad types and a very detailed control panel, ValueClick Media offers great opportunities for publishers to monetize their sites.

Features

ValueClick Media has three ways for its users to make money from their sites: display ads, affiliate marketing, and referrals. Multiple sites can be managed through a single account.

CPM display ads are offered as text, image, or video and come in the form of both in-page and window ads. Additionally, video ads can be displayed not only as in-banner, but also as in-stream, with the ads being fit to the video window and beginning either before or after the site’s media content. These ads are compatible with all major media players.

Affiliate marketing is also available through ValueClick Media and all types are controlled through one panel. These types include CPAs, CPSs, co-registrations, and promotional advertisements. These options require more effort from the site’s viewers, but also pay the publisher more when the required action is completed.

Finally, referrals can provide ValueClick Media users with a bit more revenue. When a publisher is linked to the advertising network through a user’s site and signs up, that user gets a bonus equivalent to 5% of the new user’s earnings for the first twelve months of service.

Control Panel

Display ads are controlled by a control panel that users can access by logging in to their account. This control panel offers users a remarkable degree of control over the content they publish on their site.

Publishers can view the CPM rate they are receiving from each campaign and remove their lowest paying campaigns, and even ban future campaigns from these publishers. In addition, it is possible to set a minimum CPM rate for advertisements to be shown on the site.

The control panel also displays other relevant information about the ad campaigns, including the countries targeted by the campaigns and how often each campaign generates revenue.

Finally, publishers can view their revenue in a variety of ways through their control panel, generate new codes for advertisements to be placed on their sites, and manage their personal and payment options.

The control panel for affiliate marketing, or as this site calls it, lead generation advertising, has its own control panel. This panel allows users to view the offers they may advertise, select whether they would like to do CPAs, CPSs, co-registration, or promotional ads (or more than one of these options), and to create codes for these types of ads.

It also allows publishers to view the success of their campaigns so that they can better decide which ads to run.

Available Types and Formats

In-page advertisements are available in a variety of sizes, including a leaderboard (728 x 90), a banner (468 x 60), a half page (300 x 600), a medium rectangle (300 x 250), a rectangle (180 x 150), a wide skyscraper (160 x 600), and a skyscraper (120 x 600).

Window advertisements include an interstitial (728 x 600), a pop-under (720 x 300, max 720 x 400), and an InVue (250 x 250). Rich media banners are also available, as well as in-banner and in-stream video ads that resize themselves to fit the media window on the website.

Reporting

The control panels for both CPM and affiliate marketing advertising are very detailed and customizable.

Earnings can be viewed by ad type, site, month, or campaign. Graphs of earnings are available for each day’s revenues or each month’s revenues, as well as pie charts for the revenues of each type of advertisement.

This variety of options makes it very easy to compare ad campaigns and ad sizes to find which combination is the most lucrative, as well as seeing how advertisements have done over time.

With all of these means of viewing income reports, it is much easier for publishers to decide which types of campaigns to allow and which advertisers to ban from their sites in order to maximize their earnings.

How to Get Started

To begin publishing ValueClick Media’s advertisements, site owners must complete a short application on the company’s website which is processed within 24-48 hours in order to be given an account. To be considered, publisher’s sites must have a minimum of 3000 views per month.

They must also display their content exclusively in English and own their own domain name. The sites may not support or discuss anything of a profane, adult, or illegal nature, offer incentives for clicking on advertisements, consist largely of a forum or message board, or advertise excessively.

Once accepted, publishers may log in to their account and choose the types of advertisements they would like to run. When these are selected, the control panel on their site will generate a code for this ad, which can be pasted into the website’s code. Publishers will then start generating revenue from these advertisements.

Payment

ValueClick Media pays its publishers on the 20th of each month for the preceding month’s earnings. If a publisher’s earnings for the month exceeded $25, they are eligible to receive a payment, although payment minimum amounts may also be increased through the control panel to $50, $100, or $250.

Unpaid excesses are rolled over into the next month’s earnings. Publishers can be paid by check, PayPal, and direct deposit for US and Canadian publishers.

More Information and Support

Two accounts are necessary at ValueClick Media to run both the CPM display ads and the affiliate marketing ads, and they are run through two separate control panels. Both panels, however, are very straightforward and detailed.

Support at ValueClick Media is easily reachable by phone or by email, and they have a reputation for being responsive and helpful.

Summary

ValueClick Media is outstanding due to its extensive control panel and the variety of options it offers publishers in terms of ad types.

It gives its publishers a lot of control over the content they display, and its size ensures an abundance of advertisers to fill publishers’ ad spaces, even after they weed out the lowest paying advertisements.

ValueClick Media is a strong competitor in the field of advertising networks.

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