The InClick ad management system is an enterprise class contextual ad server that you can initially implement for free. Although you’re restricted to advertiser earnings of only $500 before being required to upgrade to a license, but this gives you a chance to play around with it and see if it’s worth implementing.
The next license up doesn’t require any out of pocket monthly expenses and the only charge is a one time activation fee of $25. The fees you would pay come from a percentage of your ad revenue with the highest being 15%. For basically $25 out of pocket, you can run a full scale contextual enterprise ad server of your very own.
The application allows you to accept advertisers for your website, and if you’re planning on running an advertising network, publishers as well. It offers a self service interface where advertisers can create their ads first, then decide whether or not to sign up. Check out the advertiser demo and walk through the sample ad creation process to get a feel for your advertisers actual experience.
Ads can be sold in an auction format via proxy bid or it can be a fixed price. From the administration area, you can manage advertisers, view active or yet to be funded campaigns, and run a variety of helpful reports.
You might be wondering what I mean about running your own contextual ad server, and the most basic example would be Google Adsense. Most webmasters who are trying to monetize a website is at least somewhat familiar with Adsense, so this gives you the basic idea. If you wanted to advertise a product or service, you would pay Google to display your ad. Publishers (website owners, bloggers, etc.) would then publish those ads and make money from ad clicks and impressions.
Okay, so perhaps you don’t have any desire to compete with the all powerful Google, but you still like the idea. How can this work for you in your own niche? Let’s say you have a website about cellphones and you want to make some advertising money from your content. You setup the InClick ad server and attract cellphone related advertisers to purchase ads to be displayed on your site.
You can also try and attract publishers with sites related to the cellpone industry who will want to display these ads on their own site (not just yours) to earn a portion of the revenue (you set the percentage) and the ad server will dynamically display ads matching the page content. One of the best parts about this is the ads posted on publishers sites will still contain your “Ads By <strong>Your Site HereSphider search engine. I really saw the promise in setting up the InClick ad server, but it was just a tad too early for me. I realized I had much more site building to do before I could dedicate real time to launching a complete ad network dedicated to my niche. That time might be closer now that I’ve had time to grow. I may have to revisit the idea of launching an niche ad network before you do. 😉