Review: Burstmedia

Burst!Media is one of the oldest ad networks and it also acts as an advertising agency and can get targeted ads for your site. Burst! bills itself as "The leading advertising network representing specialty-content publishers." Basically this network looks for smaller niche content sites that it can group into categories and then offer those sites as a group. So if you don't get enough traffic to get big advertisers, Burst can pair you up with similar sites so that your "package" is more attractive to large advertisers. By and large Burst! gets fairly good ad rates, especially on targeted advertising. They also have fairly low traffic requirements for joining, requiring just 5,000 monthly impressions. However they have fairly strict topic requirements and if you run a general audience or popular culture type site they will likely reject you.

Burst! does have it's downsides. One is their technology. They are an older network, and unfortunately many times it seems like their technology has not been updated since 1996. They have made some steps to get on par with other networks as far as member management and ad serving technology goes, but they still have a long way to go.

Another downside with Burst! is that while they cater to small publishers, they do not cater to small advertisers. Burst! has a minimum ad buy of a few thousand dollars, so smaller advertisers, or those who just want to run small test campaigns first, are ignored. One major improvement Burst! could make is to take the lead of Tribal Fusion and offer smaller ad buys that you can pay for with your credit card.

Burst! takes varying amounts in commission depending on how long of a contract you sign, but their base commission for a non-exclusive contract is 50% (which you should choose). Burst supports 468x80 banners, 160x600 skyscrapers, popups, popunders, and cubes.

All in all if you can get in Burst! you should, but keep your options open and I wouldn't use them as your primary provider.

Click here to visit Burst!Media.

Can I just ask... why is it Burst is not recommended as a primary provider? Is it that their rates are not that great compared with TribalFusion for example?

Thats one reason, another is their default serving technology.

Is it possible to use TribalFusion as your primary provider, having Burst! as secondary, and if the Burst! ads run out, using there thing to display FastClick ads?

Yes, that is what I do actually.

How's the revenue compare among the three networks? Fastclick is the lowest?