Ads suck. We know that. The rise of Ad Blockers and companies moving towards an ad-free platform are on the rise, and it comes as no surprise. Consumers hate ads. Even commercials are annoying — annoying enough to encourage them to record the episodes and fast forward, or pay for a service like Netflix, and this is exactly the benefit of using ads as a service provider. While people hate ads, you are able to increase premium subscriptions and get them to buy into anything to remove the ads, given the ads aren’t too annoying they drive away traffic.

Finding a decent ad service is probably one of the most frustrating parts of building a site to make money. Not only do you have to experiment with trial and error, you have to find a service that’s attractive in terms of what if offers — Potential revenue from the service, payout options (PayPal, Wire Transfer), and payment models (Cost per action, cost per impression, cost per click), and these are all vital parts of your platform and how you will make money.

When building Terml.io, one of my partners referred me to Project Wonderful, a service based on CPI (Cost per impression), where publishers could bid on your ad space. Bids would go higher the more traffic you have, but here’s the catch: Fall below the required traffic amount and your ad gets delisted. Now, one aspect of Terml.io is that it’s almost like a seasonal business. No one goes snowboarding in the summer, and no one does flashcards or schoolwork in the summer, so shortly after Terml.io’s soft launch mid-June, our adboxes became delisted. Project Wonderful doesn’t pay very well either with a base bid at .01 cents. Yep, you heard me. Not one cent, but point zero one cents. A hundredth of a cent. But I mean, that’s no issue given that I am more focused on Premium sales rather than ad-generated revenue, but with small ads from Project Wonderful and at some points just a banner that says “Your Ad Here,” it wasn’t helping anyone.

That’s when I started searching around a little bit more. I discovered a service called RevenueHits, based off of an interesting Cost Per Action model, where my RevenueHits “pays a revenue-share out of the publisher’s traffic sales…not impressions or clicks.” Not only is their payment model attractive, but so are their ad-boxes. They have a fairly wide selection of styles and customization to choose from, as well as a simple one-line JavaScript implementation compared to ProjectWonderful’s thirty-line solution. Even better, there’s no bidding or auctioning. All ad content is provided by RevenueHits and is controlled by them with no interaction with me.

Now I’m not saying this works for everyone. Each person and site should look around to see which service appeals the most to them, but if you want to give RevenueHits a try (which I highly recommend), click on this referral link and help me help you earn some money!