Propeller Ads Review: Pros & Cons And Everything You Need To Know

Google AdSense is the biggest (and the most popular) ad network with millions of advertisers and publishers. Thanks to Google’s huge AdWords ad inventory.
However, it doesn’t really mean that AdSense is always the best way to monetize your website. There are a dozen other ad networks that are willing to pay a higher CPM for your traffic. Propeller Ads is one of them.

CPM (Cost Per Mille) stands for Cost Per 1,000 Impressions. CPM networks pays for every 1,000 impressions you generate. If a CPM ad network is paying you $1 CPM then it means that they’re paying you $1 for every 1,000 page views you generate.

Over the past one decade I’ve recommended AdSense and only AdSense — on my blog posts, blog comments, email enquiries, and everywhere else. And it was simply because… AdSense has got an ad inventory that’s unmatched by any other ad network. So, I imagined that no other ad network can beat the CPM offered by AdSense.

Read: How Much Traffic Do You Need To Make $100,000 With AdSense

But the problem is… we can’t predict the AdSense income. As you can see… I’m not longer monetizing the blog with any of those ad networks and the reason is none of them gives guaranteed income (except private ads network like BuySellAds.com).

I used to average around $0.50 per click on AdSense for several years and then it suddenly dropped to $0.05-$0.15 per click for few months and then it started giving over $1 per click. However, it didn’t last for long and I pulled off all sorts of ad networks on the blog and started selling selective private ads only.

Why Propeller Ads

Propeller Ads is an ad network based in U.K. that promises 100% of your international traffic and the highest CPM possible. Traffic from the following countries generates the maximum CPM: U.S. & Canada, U.K., and Australia.
Unlike Google AdSense, Propeller Ads is a CPM ad network which basically means that it pays for every 1,000 ad impressions you generate. So it doesn’t matter whether the users are clicking your ads or not — you get paid! And that’s why large publishers prefer CPM networks over CPC ad networks (like AdSense, Bing Ads, etc.).
If your traffic and its quality is stable then CPM ads can generate guaranteed income every day and every month. Have you ever noticed the way some of the high-traffic websites display content as 10-50 slides? Yes, it’s to increase the number of pages views per visit — and eventually the CPM.

Propeller Ads: Types Of Ad Products

Propeller Ads offers you a variety of ad products and that’s one space where Propeller Ads outsmart other ad networks — including Google AdSense. So it doesn’t matter what type of your blog or website you own — there will always be an ad product for you.
But that doesn’t mean that you can send them fake traffic (autosurf, traffic exchanges, etc.) and make a lot of money. It won’t work that way. Obviously.
Here are the different types of ad products offered by Propeller Ads:

1. OnClick PopUnder Ads

OnClick PopUnder Ads is perhaps the most effective ad product by Propeller Ads as it offers the maximum CPM rate (up to $10). It’s because you get paid for each ad impression (it works on mobile devices too!).
According to Propeller Ads, entertainment websites (music, movies, photo, downloads, games, viral content, etc.) gets the best CPM for pop-under ads.
Here is what can you expect from a:
Gaming Website

Viral Blog

2. Mobile Ads

Propeller Ads offers two types of mobile ads: Mobile Dialog Ads and Mobile Interstitial Ads (apart from the regular mobile banner ads).
Here is what can you expect from a:
Music Website

Mobile Dialog Ads
Dialog Ads is a kind of an alert that show users as a dialogue box. So it’s almost certain to attract  user’s attention and that should result in higher click-through-rate and thereby CPM.
Here is what can you expect from a:
Music Website

Mobile Interstitial Ads
Mobile Interstitial Ads is a full screen mobile ad. It’s one of the top performing ad product by Propeller Ads because of its higher user engagement.
Here is what can you expect from a:
Entertainment Blog

3. Classic Banner Ads

Banner ads are still popular as it’s the easiest way to reach out to a massive audience at minimal costs. The best performing banner ads by Propeller Ads are ad units of sizes: 300×250 and 728×90. Other available ad units are: 468×60, 120×600, 160×600, 800×600, 800×440, and 320×50.
You can check out their best practices for banner ads placement here. According to Propeller Ads, entertainment blogs and download sites tends to perform better than other niche.
Here is what can you expect from a:
Movie Website

Mobile Apps Review Website

Gaming Blog

4. Layer Ads

Layer Ad is a banner ad on steroid as it loads banner ads over the website content. You can choose any of the available banner ad units but a bigger ad unit such as 800×600 or 800×440 is recommended.

5. Slider Ads

Slider Ad is again another kind of banner ad that fades in at the bottom of a web page. Unless the user decides to close, it’s always visible even if he/she is scrolling up or down.

6. Direct Ads

Direct Ads (or Direct Links) is a unique ad product in which publishers are given a URL to promote. You can promote it by creating your own banner ads, text link ads, buttons, or even redirects.
For instance, you can monetize your 404 pages with a direct ad — without hurting user experience. According to Propeller Ads, it works best on a downloads website (ebooks, music, apps, wallpapers, movies, etc.)
Here is what can you expect from a:
File Sharing Website

Video Sharing Website

7. Video Ads

If you want to monetize your video content then can try Video Ads. Propeller Ads offers three video ad spots: Pre-Roll, Mid-Roll, Post-Roll, and Pre-Game.
Note: All the earning screenshots are collected as part of the research (with majority of them shared by Propeller Ads itself on request). I do not run Propeller Ads on my blog as I prefer selling private ads only. I’ve included as much screenshots as I can — from different industires — so that you can use it as a benchmark to find out whether your earnings are on par with other publishers.

Propeller Ads: Pros & Cons

First things first. Propeller Ads is not exactly an AdSense alternative. Google AdSense is a pay-per-click ad network and Propeller Ads is a CPM ad network. It basically means, AdSense pays for each click-throughs from your website and Propeller Ads pays for every 1,000 ad impressions.

Read: Over 40 Google AdSense Alternatives To Make Money Blogging

Google AdSense works best when your website is in a competitive niche with majority of traffic from organic search (that is, from search engines). If you have a high traffic website that’s in a non-competitive industry then the AdSense earnings could be terrible (especially when its organic traffic is less).
Again, AdSense is a good choice for file sharing websites, forums, downloads websites where the traffic quality is low but the page views/visits ratio is very high. Luckily Propeller Ads (and similar banner networks) works very well on such websites.

Pros

• It’s super easy to get started as all accounts are activated instantly. You can login to your publisher account and add all the domain names that you wish to monetize and you will be notified via email when it’s approved.
• Propeller Ads share 80% of their ad revenue with publishers. But it’s not a good idea to compare two advertisers based only on their revenue sharing percentage as we don’t know the real size of their total ad inventory. An advertiser with a massive ad inventory can easily beat the CPM of a small ad network with just 50% revenue sharing.
• The reporting of Propeller Ads is pretty simple. It shows your earnings in a tabular way or on a chart. And the best thing? It’s real-time!
• Propeller Ads supports the following payment methods: Wire Transfer, Payoneer, Webmoney, and Prepaid Cards. The minimum payment amount will be $500 for Wire Transfers and $100 for all other payment methods and is based on a NET 30 terms. That is, if your total earnings at the end of January is $300 then you will be paid in the first week of March.
• Propeller Ads accepts all websites irrespective of their traffic as long as it doesn’t violate their terms and conditions.
• It generates the maximum CPM for entertainment websites (including downloads, music, movies, viral blogs, etc.).
• As a publisher you can refer other publishers to Propeller Ads and can earn 5% of his/her future ad revenue — for lifetime.
• You can even monetize your 404 pages with a full-screen ad. No more wasted traffic!
• You can run Propeller Ads along with ads from other advertising or affiliate networks — like AdSense, Infolinks, CJ, etc.
• If you are a new publisher and is looking for some personal assistance then you get direct one-to-one support via email or Skype. Also, if you have a high traffic website then you get a dedicated account manager who will assist you to optimize the traffic.

Cons

• Poor user experience. Your visitors may find full-screen ads, pop-under ads, push ads, etc. as annoying.
• Do not support PayPal payments. It’s really a big turn off because even almost all top AdSense alternatives support PayPal.
• Once again, the minimum payout is also on the higher side. And I suppose it’s because they do not support PayPal payments.
• The best performing ad units are not traditional banner ads or mobile ads — it’s pop-under ads and full-page ads. But users (including me) hate it. However, if you have a high traffic file sharing website or a downloads website or a maybe even a forum then pop-under ads could be the right choice.
• It’s true that Propeller Ads is accepting all sorts of publisher websites (unless of course it doesn’t comply with their terms and conditions) but it appears like if you want to generate handsome income then you need either a high-traffic website or a website with high-quality traffic.
• If your traffic quality is low (it means you get few traffic from U.S., U.K., and Europe) then Propeller Ads may not be a right choice unless you want to try pop-under ads, full-page ads, etc.
• Again, Propeller Ads considers conversions as well when calculating CPM. A CPM network is supposed to pay a fixed income for every 1,000 pages views irrespective of conversions. But Propeller Ads offers more payment models to advertisers like — CPC (Cost Per Click) and CPA (Cost Per Action). So your final earnings depends upon the type of ad inventory too.
• Your CPM could be extremely low if the traffic quality is poor. Of course, AdSense also do not pay much for low quality traffic but at Propeller Ads it’s much more worse. Here’s a screenshot of a popular Spanish tech blog that receives no meaningful traffic from English speaking countries. Its CPM with Google AdSense was around $0.20 but as you can see Propeller Ads’ banner ads are not even generating a CPM of $0.05.

Conclusion

Propeller Ads is not another network where you could fake traffic and money. Like AdSense or any other reliable publisher network — you need real traffic to make real income.

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