CrispAds Makes Major Improvements

by Sapphire (August 25, 2005)

Look at the sidebar - it’s about midway down the page. It’s CrispAds, with a new look, and so far, it’s looking good.

CrispAds has made some serious changes within the last few days. I haven’t seen a formal announcement of this in detail anywhere (just a quick blurb at the bottom of their site), so I’m going to sum up what I understand (and hopefully someone will correct me if I make any mistakes or leave anything out).

First, the look. Fast-loading, hot, pays attention to your CSS stylesheet so it fits right in with your site. You can change the background color for customization, which means you can make it jump out or fade in, according to what works best for you. I just used mine as is, and I like it.

Did you notice the relevance of the ads it’s showing? That’s because you specify the relevant keywords in your control panel. This allows the sort of control I wish I’d had with AdSense. Remember my “B-2 Bomber” site that’s so niche I could never use AdSense because it just couldn’t sort out what the site was about? Too bad I couldn’t tell it. Oh, but wait - I can tell CrispAds. And the results - totally relevant ads on the B-2 Bomber as well, for the first time with any ad network I’ve used (AdSense, Pheedo and AdBrite).

Now, here we get into the nitty gritty. The point of running CrispAds on your site is now, more than ever before, to sell that ad space in the form of a graphical ad. If you despise graphical ads, you can stick to PPC with CrispAds - it’s 20 cents per click instead of 25, but that’s still quite decent. Or you can go with AdBrite, who works exactly like CrispAds (PPC ads are put in your unsold ad space) albeit with less targeted ads. Personally, as you can see above, I like graphical ads just fine, as long as they load quickly. This is something CrispAds is going to have to be very careful with. So far, they’ve done well.

On their main page, they claim:

August 25, 2005 - CrispAds announces new text ad format and addition of 6,000 advertisers with keyword targeting.

Behind all these obvious, visible changes, it looks like the people at CrispAds have been working hard to make some invisible improvements as well. 6,000 new advertisers gives you much higher chances of both selling your space and getting some good PPC ads while you wait. Obviously, it’s not a claim I can verify, but I’m looking at the variety of ads I’m getting for PPC - even on that niche site AdSense could never figure out - and I’m thinking they must have plenty of advertisers to do the job.

This all looks really, really good to me so far. Kudos to everyone at CrispAds for providing a really good ad network for bloggers!

Posted in Ad Networks, Blogging
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