Value Click Media (Ad Network) Review 1

Over many years, I’ve had the experience with working with many ad agencies and ad networks that operate on the Internet such as Google Adsense, Value Click, adBrite, etc. Today, I figured I should write a review on one of them for once. ^^

I’ve used VCM for nearly a year now and it has been one of my better experiences with ad networks.

The part I love the most is that they allow you to control each ad by yourself. Of course, you can contact their support staff – whom are very helpful, but nothing beats doing it yourself. Ad you don’t like? Just disable it. Their control panel also offers one of the greatest control over filters, ad types, ad value, etc that allows you to really control every aspect of the ad network.

Their CPM is also quite reasonable and are able to cover globally without much problem. Of course, exactly how much depends on your page view count, your target locations, your niche greatly to specify, but they have generally been above average.

VCM pays on a net-20, which is faster than most other ad networks out there and they pay exactly on time with exactly the value they said they would pay. I always hated how Google Adsense would say “you will get X” but the money you actually lot lower, it was lower by as much as 25% for me once with adsense. It’s like a complete disappointment. None of that crap with VCM.

There are 2 primary issues I had with VCM.

1. Filters that doesn’t work perfectly. For example, I did not want any ads with auto-playing sounds. So, I set a filter that says don’t display those ads. But they’d often sneak in even with the filter. This was sometimes due to incorrect flagging or their 3rd party ad network usages. So, I had to turn off “multiple ads” as well for it. Ad quality in general is quite good though. No virus, malware, redirects or popups. It’s “brand safe” in the terms of industry.

2. Fill rate. For most websites, I think they’ll have a pretty easy time giving near 100% fill ratio. But a site with high page view count per visit had a low fill rate with VCM. When I mean low, I mean above average, but networks like Adsense with huge # of advertisers or those who gurantee 100% fill rate, it’s pretty crappy and defaults quite a lot.

Not necessarily a peeve of mine, but VCM also has strict ad placements. For example, you can’t have a 728×90 ad placed below top 500pixels of your website. This means their ads has to be visible on load without scroll. So, in areas where such type of ad placement isn’t possible, VCM gets difficult to use.

VCM also has a good support. Their support system is actually responsive and polite. You can ask them questions, ask for assistance, etc.  I find this extremely necessary in any ad networks… (I’m saying Adsense sucks. zero support)

I also had one odd incident with VCM. Their spider bot which was crawling my website had, at one time, 3000 connections open with my server. o.O!! I crashed that day… I called their head office to report of this issue and they forwarded me to their tech department who was… out of office… So, I had to end up blocking their server from mine and left a note saying they’re effectively DoSing my server. It ended bit disappointingly though, instead of acknowledging a problem for them to fix, they just said they’d stop crawling my site. Not exactly the solution I was looking for. Partly, I don’t think they believed me for some reason… To which I obviously cannot confirm.

Anyway, even with all these incidents, I think they’re still quite above average ad network. I’d give it a 4/5 rating. 😀
Arguably, my standard for “average” with ad networks is quite low.