At the beginning of the month I compared Google AdSense to Text-Link-Ads, and the different prospects for each. Well, I have been running both services side-by-side on this blog for a month now. Which one do you think made me the most money?

Text-Link-Ads is a marketplace for publishers to sell ad space (and marketers to buy it). TLA ads are noninvasive, basic text links to a website. Advertisers can browse through the catalogue of websites and purchase a link on any one for a fixed price. The price of a text link ad is determined by a number of factors, including the publisher’s Google PageRank and Alexa ranking.

I have been using Text-Link-Ads for a little less than a month now, and have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it is a very straightforward and simple way to sell ad space on your site. However, I only sold one link at a rate of $17.00/month. The link was only purchased a couple weeks ago, so I only received payment for part of the month.

At $17.00/month (actually, it’s $20 now), with TLA taking half of the earnings, that leaves me with about $8.50/month. That’s assuming the advertisers keeps the link for the entire period. In my case they didn’t, so I’ll only get about $4 at the end of this month.

On the other hand, AdSense has only produced $0.61 for this blog during January. Granted, Ontora is still pretty young, so our traffic doesn’t generate any high click through rates yet. Still, TLA seems to be a reasonable supplemental income, especially if the website is still green like in my case.

One of my complaints with Text-Link-Ads is that I don’t have a say in the link price. I would be willing to sell links for $5/month if it meant more links would be sold. The problem I see here is that paying for a single ad spot for an entire month is a big investment for any company. Even at $20 a month, they are pretty much putting all their eggs in one basket.

In the end, I give TLA a thumbs up as a secondary source of revenue. Selling links can take a while, so you might as well focus your efforts on AdSense.