There is a group of internet businesses tapping into the PPC market, only this time they are earning money instead of spending it. If you recall, last week we discussed the second PPC revolution brought by Google. It involved the inclusion of small websites into the publishers list. Some of these websites today are racking in hundred of thousands and even millions of shillings monthly in commissions.



Being accepted into a publisher's list means your website can display PPC adverts by that particular company. And for every advert clicked within your website, the company pays you a commission. Your cut could vary from 40% to 75% making advert placement a very lucrative income stream even for website with relatively low traffic.

The adverts displayed on your site vary depending on which PPC you elect to work with. The most common are contextual ads. Though appropriately labeled as ads, they appear as normal text links on the website. As a publisher you have reasonable liberty as to exactly how these adverts look like. You can change colors as well as formats to complement the look and feel of your website if you so wish. In many cases the said adverts are said to be most effective in terms of earnings. However you could opt to have them stand out. It all depends on testing and finding what works best for your site.

There are several publishers programs, but probably the most popular and most proven in results is Adsense - again by Google. Adsense is the reverse of Adword mentioned here last week. An anticipated competitor is YPN by rival Yahoo. YPN is still being tested and currently it only open to a select few in the U.S. Though this two make up the major player, other smaller PPC companies have publishers programs worth considering

They include Chitika. Chitika's ads are not exactly contextual, rather there considered more of merchandising kind of ads. Similarly the ads by Kontera are what are called in-text advertisement. Both kinds of adverts are a whole different topic for another day.

Others are PPCProfitMachine that runs an interesting integration of five different PPC; AffiliateSensor whose ads specifically market digital books (ebooks); and AffiliatePowerAds which pays per sale rather than per click.

Just to give you an idea of the potential of these programs, the home improvement website, AskTheBuilder that serves Google's Adsense makes $30,000 monthly in commissions. That's an equivalent of Ksh 2,130,000 every month. Though that sounds like quite a sum for just putting ads on your website, consider that such a website has a more than decent traffic. Not to mention the work gone into building over 10,000 web pages. As they say, nothing good comes easy.