Your site gets a lot of traffic but not quite the amount of clicks that you desire. You may also feel the need to replace those ugly contextual text ads with some cool flash banners. In these cases, CPM (cost per thousand impressions) networks are definitely your best choice.
So what exactly is a CPM network? CPM networks are revenue programs that will pay you to display certain ads on your website. Usually these are flash/image ads. For every 1000 impressions, the network will pay you a certain amount of money.
CPM networks are much more selective about which sites they allow in their programs. The top networks are Tribal Fusion, Burst Media, and Casale Media. These networks are referred to as top tier networks because only the highest and most-trafficked websites can be selected. Tribal Fusion has the best rates for CPM ads, but they are also the hardest network to enter. Unless your site is bringing in 100,000 unique visitors per month, it will be hard to be admitted into Tribal Fusion. The other two, Casale Media and Burst Media, are also very selective, but they do admit more sites into their program than Tribal Fusion. Rest assured, if your site gets admitted into any of these CPM programs then you are set to make cash.
This brings us to the second-tier networks. These networks are decent, but they will not bring in as much money. The upside is that they don’t have requirements that are as strict as those of top-tier networks. One of the best 2nd tier networks is RealTechNetwork, which is the closest thing to top-tier that a second-tier can get. If you must choose a second-tier network, try your hardest to get into RealTech. If you are denied, then look at this site for a good list of CPM networks. I won’t go into detail about each second-tier network since I have yet to try all of them.
