Fastclick Reviewed – Advertising suitable for high traffic Blogs

Fastclick is a revenue stream that will be suitable for some highly trafficked blogs. We trailed it recently on our Olympics blog and found that with the levels of traffic that we generated at the height of the games that it out performed all other revenue streams on the site including Google.

They offer a range of ads – mainly paying on a per impression basis. Pay outs depend on the ad size, style and content but are generally very very small. As a result a blog with only a small amount of visitors would probably find it more hassle than its worth to register and run with.

They have a good variety of ad formats including:
In Page Formats
– Medium Rectangle (300×250)
– Rectangle (180×150)
– Wide Skyscraper (160×600)
– Skyscraper (120×600)
– Leaderboard (728×90)
– Banner (468×60)
– Half Page (300×600)

Window Formats
– Interstitial (728×600)
– Pop-Under (up to 720×400)
– InVue (250×250)

There are some restrictions with where you are allowed to place the ads – most must appear above the fold of your blog or in the first 500 pixels of the page. This stops people hiding them away at the bottom of your site.

They also have some restrictions on what type of blogs they’ll allow to sign up for their advertising program. You need to have a minimum of 3000 impressions per month and have to agree to some conditions which are pretty normal for these types of systems.

Fastclick does not charge any fees to run with the program – instead they take a cut of the earnings (35%).

Ads vary in quality – to be honest some of them are annoying – you’ve probably seen some of their banner and skyscraper ads for smiley faces in the past – some look quite cheap and nasty and you may consider blocking the most offensive if you’re wanting to convey a sense of quality on your blog. I blocked some but found that some ad formats were worse than others.

If they have no ads to serve you they will link to PSAs (public service announcements) unless you specify an alternate ad for them to serve to your blog.

Overall I’ve found
Fastclick to be a useful revenue stream. Like Adsense its one of those systems that you just set up and let run. There is no imbedding of affiliate links or constantly checking to see if products have changed – you add the code to your site and let them do all the work. Their stats are updated live throughout the day and come with analysis tools that graph your earnings and tell you which ads are performing and which are not.

As I said above – it is not a system that will suit all blogs – but its worth signing up for to test and see how it works for you.