I’ve joined two ad exchange programs served by Spottt and adGridWork because I like the idea of letting the blog adverts by itself rather than via paid reviews or Adwords campaigns.

Spottt Link Exchange

I got Spottt’s service via a post by Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. The service is part of the Adbrite advertising network, but is being run as a separate brand.

Despite not-so-good reputation of Adbrite, I think this is really a smart idea. You place the Spottt 125×125 ad unit on your site (above the fold, i.e. no more than 850 pixels from the top of the page) and for every two ad impressions that you serve, you’ll get one free ad somewhere on the network.

You may notice that Spottt keeps 50% of the ad inventory for itself. Mike revealed that Spottt will just place their own ads on your site for the first year and after a year they’ll add the extra inventory to Adbrite and let advertisers purchase it.

I’m fond of 125×125 ad unit (I suppose it’s the least annoying ad banner) and they gave me first 1,000 impressions for free with a code on signing up (”valentine” — not sure if it’s still working today, you know it’s no longer Valentine day but you can try). My designer has created a 125×125 ad for my blog as below.

And here are stats for my blog for a few days I integrated Spott’s link-exchange widget into JustTalkAboutWeb.com.

I gave 3,463 impressions with 17 clicks and gained 2,537 impressions with 16 clicks - quite a balanced sheet, right? However, I think the rate of 50% impressions they take for themselves is too high while the competitive network, Entrecard, doesn’t take any.

adGridWork Text Ads

Not like Spottt, adGridWork serves text-only ads and it doesn’t take anything for itself as stated by the owners in FAQ:

Q: If adgridwork is free, how do you plan on making a living off of it?

A: We do not make any money much less a living off of adgridwork. We handle the site in our free time (though lately with the launch it does feel more like a job :-). We simply had an idea and wanted to see it through - see if it would catch on. We have never had any plans to make a living or any money at all from running adgridwork. We just want to make something that people will use. (Plus if it catches on, it will look really good on a resume

The system is a bit more complicated: display frequency of your ad on other sites does not only depend on number of impressions other ads gained on your site but also how many clicks you give. This encourages you to put adGridWork’s ads on higher visible places rather than just to force you placing ads above the fold like Spott does.

adGridWork has a nice UI and good management/statistics pages that look very 2.0.

For a couple of hours, I’ve got 77 impressions but no click though. I’ll update the program performance after several days.

Conclusion

Link exchange is a great idea (though not really new). By joining these networks, blog owner has opportunity to make use of his/her blog pageviews for free ad. Most of us have no money for costly paid ad campaigns because we sell nothing in my blog (yes, we can have sponsors’ links but they aren’t our products, right?)

Just one thing I still concern is if these programs are 100% compatible with Adsense TOS? Do you have any advice about this?

Recommended Reading: This site recommends Website Magazine for 'Net Success

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