© 2004, John Calder
http://www.TheEzine.net

Since Google announced their revenue-sharing Adsense program in mid-2003, Internet marketers and other webmasters alike have embraced the program wholeheartedly. For content-heavy, non-commercially oriented sites, Adsense revenue is a welcome way to help defer hosting and other costs of running their sites. For marketers, Adsense is yet another revenue stream to add to pages that may already contain affiliate links, info products, and so on. For many marketers, Adsense was the first time they realized that they could make money from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, rather than just spend money on it!

But there are other PPC search engines who are willing to share their revenues with webmasters who place ads on their sites. For example, Searchfeed has been in business since late 2000, and RevenuePilot has offered revenue-sharing since July of 2002. In addition, the availability of PPC programs has made it possible for many smaller PPC engines to set up shop. Of course, you should always know who you're doing business with, so be sure to learn what you can about the company and who's running it before you do business in a big way with them.

It's true that payouts from Google's Adsense program are generally higher than from other PPC engines. That's not always true, of course, but it generally seems to be the case. The smaller PPCs do have some unique advantages of their own, that aren't found with Adsense.

For example, most PPC engines will let you recruit affiliates and pay you an override on their earnings. Granted, it's not much, but with enough affiliates it can add up. Adsense only offers javascript display, while some other PPCs offer javascript and XML feeds, as well as real-time search results from a search box. Most PPCs will also tell you how much a click will pay you, while Adsense is very secretive about total earned, payout percentage, etc.

In short, for the sake of diversifying your sources of revenue, take a closer look at the other PPCs for some of your sites.