I recently missed my Google AdSense payment threshold by $0.02 and that got me thinking if I really have the right ad network for my Blog, so I started to do a bit of research on what other advertising networks I can replace AdSense with. The number one name that kept on coming up was RevenueHits. There was no approval process (first warning sign perhaps?), their website was very simplistic and straight forward and setting up your ads was quite easy. It was not until after I did some trial runs with it that I discovered the true extent of how discredited this advertising network was.

The very first thing I noticed was that the code that was used to place ads on your site doesn't handle placements properly. So in my blog where I typically have two ad spaces per article, it ended up putting both ads immediately after one another. The result was not glamorous...


The same article with AdSense rendered the ads correctly...


This is something I could deal with and could have fixed with some effort. Instead I decided to poke around the different options and advertising types first.

When creating a new ad placement, these are the options you were given:


Now that I looked at these closer, alarm bells started to go off all over the place for me...footer ads, interstitials, popunders, shadow boxes, sliders and top bar ads. All of these are the annoying ad types that nobody wants to see, unfortunately this made up most of the ad placements available from RevenueHits. Any one of these ads are a quick way to annoy your readers and you may as well write a big fat 'this blog is not credible and untrustworthy' across the top of every page if you use any of them.



I didn't stop looking yet and came across a feature that let me preview the ads that would be displayed within an ad placement. That's quite a nice feature, but it also revealed the true nature of the ads being served...



Credible ads? I don't think so. Clicking on that second one also takes you to some website that seems to try to disguise itself as a Flash installer but no doubt installs some kind of malware instead...


It was at this point that I've decided that RevenueHits was not worth it since I actually care about a good reading experience for my Blog's readers.

I tried to find a way to delete my account and surprise surprise, there was none! Contacting RevenueHits to delete my account was met with me being asked why I want to do this instead of actually doing what I asked.

So if you have a blog that you think is credible and want to monetise it, stay away from RevenueHits as it will reduce your content to malware spamming garbage of a site that their advertising network seems to incentivise.

Needless to say, I've decided to stick with AdSense!

-i