In any event, adsense alternatives are all about the niche. I saw a guy today discussing the fact that he was getting $1.50 epc on financial keywords from Peakclick. Peakclick is pretty, shall we say, indiscriminate in what kind of traffic they allow and quite a few blackhats use it (in part because it had a module included with rssgm) and I think they mostly pay a good deal less than that. But, 1.50/click is pretty good! You have to measure and test…your contextual ad payouts are going to be based on competition. Competition in second tier and lower search advertising is going to be driven by smart account executives who raise competitive instincts to a high pitch. Since the number of smart executives is decidedly finite, but certainly distributed, there will be high paying pockets of keywords for almost any adsense alternative.

The biggest problem from a publisher’s point of view s that there are too many niche search engines and other CPC sites that do a great job of collecting niche advertisers but then don’t offer an effective distribution method akin to adsense. It is very frustrating to find these “walled gardens” specialty sites and then after a site search and an email discover that you can’t put this inventory to use.

I found the best thing to monetize is to find the right combinations of CPM, CPC, and affiliates. For example a website that gets a lot of page views you may want to find a CPM network, a website where people are looking for specific products may be better served to have both CPC and affiliate links.

@WhateverYourRealNameIs:  AdSense is good for what it is  designed to be: a contextual ad program with built in performance tracking. If your site coverage is broad, AdSense makes sense because Google parses well and measures intent and “stretches” to find performance opportunities for ads… all at a relatively low cost. The people looking for alternatives to AdSense because they have been dropped, experience that - AdSense was better than others. But publishers looking to build monetizable media should look beyond AdSense. Of the “alternatives to AdSense” commonly discussed, most are simply copycats.

@Todd: Actually, that is natural writing. Yes, I wanted to go back and edit the list items *after the fact* because it seemed to repeat “AdSense Alternatives”  too much, but then I resisted because that would be letting Google change my writing for fear of appearing to be spammy.