Signing up for an account is fairly easy and pain-free, they demand you the basic distinctive questions like name address, payee tax information, and so on. You're then expected to input your web site details and give a few data about your website. The data meant to help your website get enrolled in the right area, and help likely advertisers situate it. The most difficult part of the entire process is fixing your prices. As a publisher you want to get the highest price potential for your advertising space.

As the customer purchasing the ad you want to pay the lowest price possible. You can set various pricing models such as 7 day advertising, 1 month advertising, or any other time fame you want to create. I'd suggest keeping it simple and offering some sort of discount for monthly advertisers, but that's just my opinion. You can also set up a pay per click model if you desire. The difficult thing is getting the price right. I'd suggest setting the price a little high and slowly working down until you start to get customers.

Now you could go back and raise the price afterward, but unless things have changed that's a dangerous path to start down. Once you get pricing worked out, it's all down hill, a few simple lines of code that work via javascript and you're in business. It may take a day or so for you get in the system so be patient, your ads will start to appear.

Once someone decides to advertise on your website you'll get an email from the system alerting you there is a new ad up for review. As the site owner you have the ability to review and approve or reject ads, nothing will appear unless you approve it. Once approved it takes a few hours for advertising to start to appear on your site, so again be patient. Another thing you'll notice is AdBrite starts to gather stats about your website, including things like Alexa Rank, page views per day, unique users per day, repurchase rate, and some estimated click through data.

This information is available not only to potential advertising customers, but anyone who wants to look, so this program is best suited for websites you are comfortable with revealing some data about. Something to be aware of is, if you list more than one site in your AdBrite account, anyone who checks the stats will see the connection between the two websites. Personally that's something I would like to see changed, but there are ways around the system for those who would like to remain anonymous.

So is Adbrite worth it? Well looking at my rates and stats you can see I'm not making a heck of a lot of money. However my intent here was experimentation not profitability. Looking at some other sites who use Adbrite like Friendster, Gawker, and NHL dot com and you can see the prices jump up considerably. AdBrite does take a percentage of your advertising income. Looking around I can't find the actual percentage listed on the site (they only give a vague reference to taking a percentage, and that's something they should fix).

Looking at my earnings report it looks to be about 25%. If you're a small person and don't mind doing the legwork of selling and billing advertisers yourself, you could probably do better on your own. If you don't want the hassle it's probably worth using a service like AdBrite. Additionally if you'd like to sell advertising on your site but don't want to get involved with the hornets nest surrounding text links, this may be a very attractive solution for you. (For the record I fully support straight text link advertising, not only do I think it's a viable and effective solution, I am customer of Text-Link-Ads dot com).

Sixty days after you've hit your minimum payout (the lowest payout is $20) you'll get a report via email telling you a check has been sent listing the amount and statistics for the pay period. You can also log into your account and see future payments and dates.

Is AdBrite for everyone, no. In my opinion AdBrite is a good solution for people who have sites with reasonable traffic that would be attractive to advertisers, and who want to focus on running the site and not selling and maintaining adverting placement, and billing. While the percentage they take may be a little high, it will give you one less thing to worry about, and let's you focus on things like adding content and running your website.