I got lucky on this one. Marc Womack tried aggressively to recruit me into his publisher network back when he was new. But his interface at the time was wildly hostile and non-intuitive, and the high-pressure "give me your phone number so my guy in the Philippines can get on the phone with you to walk you through everything" stuff didn't work for me. So I never put any of my inventory with them.
All I've ever wanted was an ad broker with (1) a setup to let me directly sell my own inventory slots to advertisers coming in from my pages and (2) the ability to let me exercise absolute control over the ads that appear in my inventory slots. It's been a wild ride.
Adbrite was good at first, back before they got cold feet about adult and co-branded with the AVN people. The AVN co-branding was a disaster when that relationship started going sour; for a while they were literally stealing all the leads generated by the "your ad here" links on my pages, sending it to a generic "leave your email and our run-of-network salesmen will be in touch" page instead of to the advertising sales pages for my inventory.
Then the divorce was finalized and I was back to dealing with Adbrite, now branded as Black Label Ads. That was a disaster because they turned into thieves. Not only did they give themselves a thirty day payment holiday last November ("We are reaching out to inform you that we are changing the payment terms on your account from net 30 to the standard Black Label Ads payment terms of net 60") but even before that they changed their code to throw up an interstitial ad on my "your ad here" links that permanently institutionalize the "skimming my sales leads off to their run-of-network salesmen instead of sending my advertisers directly to my sales page" bullshit. They didn't even offer to pay a referral commission. When I complained, my account manager told me to get stuffed. ("The change that has been made is unilateral, affects all clients at all levels in our business and is not amendable.")
Oh, yeah, and also:
Not to mention:
Meanwhile, they stopped disclosing the per-click pricing of the pay-per-click advertising they wanted to put in my zones, and started flooding me with extremely crappy non-performing network ads for penis pills and cams and credit-card-slamming dating sites. Basically, it all just went to shit. To cap it off, when I would get somebody who wanted to direct-buy an ad, I stopped getting emails to alert me, so I couldn't sell my own ads any more. (I never bothered to contact support about that, by then I was pulling my links and zones as fast as I could.)
I made a brief fling at trying Ero-Advertising but there were several things that did not work for me. I was in a bad mood that week and may not have given them a fair shake, nothing bad to report from the experience, just couldn't get their interface to deliver what I needed at the time. Might have been their feature set or their interface but was more probably a PEBKAC issue (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair).
All of which is by way of mentioning that I've been tinkering with
Juicy Ads for the last two weeks and I'm liking it
a lot so far. Nice clean interface that is intuitive and gives me what I want; very good ability to control the appearance and content of my ad zones; and good sales pages for potential advertisers who hit my "your ad here" links. Best of all, they do great click-through reporting in a way that puts a mutual incentive on advertiser and publisher alike to maximize click-throughs. And, rubber meets road, I've already picked up $500 in ad sales that I wouldn't have made without them. There's room for things to improve, in an "I've got a features wishlist" kind of way -- and I still have a TON of ad zones to roll out onto their network -- but I'm really enjoying the
Juicy Ads publisher experience so far.