It’s time to review an Advertisement Network that I have been using for about 8 years, ValueClick Media.
That first sentence might reveal what I think of them, but I will try to give an honest review of this great company.
There are a lot of different opportunities on Internet when it comes to making money. A simple and often very effective way is to turn to an Advertisement Company. The way they work is that the connect advertisers with publishers, and offers us publishers to show ads from large companies that we would never be able to sign an ad deal with our self. The drawback is that you wont get all the money, but still they probably deal better that most of you would do with the advertisers.


ValueClick Media offers a very large amount of advertisers to choose from as an advertiser. When you start, just let all the ads be checked so they are rotated on your site. What you can do later when you have about 10.000 – 50.000 impressions is that you can sort the list of advertisers after eCPM (the effective earnings per 1000 impressions for you). Look at the once in the bottom that doesn’t make you any money and uncheck them. Normally the once in the bottom of the list are ads that pay per click, and I normally uncheck them if they have been served about 200 times and yet still haven’t received a click. CPC ads CAN make you alot of money if they match your content good, but if they don’t they probably wont get any clicks = no money for you.

ValueClick Media has atleast 50% CPM ads so you will get mainly CPM ads and they can make you pretty good money. We often say that CPM ads works best for sites with a general audience. They work just as good on niche sites, but on those sites it’s often easy to sell specific products via affiliate programs that can make you a lot more than CPM ads can.

Available formats: 460/728 (both separate and mixed),  popunders, skyscrapers (120/160 wide), inVue, Interstitial, medium rectangle, rectangle, half page, Video Media Campaigns and “flexible banner” (that I don’t really know what it is).

The CPM is hard to say, because it depends very much on the genre of your site and the positions of your ads. But from our experience an entertainment site get’s about $.30 CPM for 460/728 and skyscrapers. Popunders and Interstitial gets around $2.50. A banner size that very many webmasters overlook and forget is the Medium Rectangle (also called Box) 300×250 which can get a about 5 times more than a leaderboard if you place it inside your content.

ValueClick Media is one of the networks that it’s pretty hard to be accepted to, and because of that they pay the sites they have better than the ordinary ad networks. They only accept high quality sites and they don’t accept sites that they already have to many of, so if you get accepted you know  that they have pretty many ads that needs to be shown in your category. I don’t remember the minimum number of visitors they want you to have, but I think it’s more important to have a high quality site in the correct category to be accepted.

The support is great, you get surprisingly quick response from them and for us in Sweden we get support in our native language because they have an office here as well. The headquarter and tech people are located in US though, so for those kinds of questions it’s always US people that handle.

The fill is normally very good, but one of the reasons are probably that they have a lot of “fill campaigns” that don’t pay to much. Those are normally ads like “congratulations you are the 999999999th visitor, come get a free something”. What you can do is to setup your own ads or insert a second ad network via Valueclick. If they don’t have ads for you they automatically show the other ad codes instead. This function is actually pretty good, which is unusual at other ad networks.

When talking about the interface this is one thing that they should work on. It’s not bad at all even though it can be slow pretty often, but they should get a face lift and maybe include some new functions and other more modern things. I think they have had the exact same interface the whole time I have been with them, and that is about 7 or 8 years. The one thing that I would like them to fix is a more advanced statistics function. If they could only be a little bit more like google analytics in their graphs :-) But it still does what it should!

A really nice thing is that they can pay directly to a bank account which is great for foreign countries that often have to pay about $20 to cash in a check. Of course they also pay by check and paypal.

As a total I am VERY happy with this company and you should absolutely try  to get in there. if your site don’e have atleast 1000 or 2000 daily visitors I would guess it’s better to wait until later to register. (This is only my personal guess) If you get declined once you automatically get’s rejected the next time, so you have to talk personally with them and convince them to accept them and that is hard I guess.

If any one else has experience of ValueClick or have questions feel free to post a comment below!

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