To be honest there are no real alternative for adsense when it comes to relevancy of ads and earning potential. But if we had to list an alternative then I would go with ad networks like
Chitika, Bidvertiser, Media.net etc.
Chitika
When YPN (Yahoo! Publisher Network) was shutdown they recommended their publishers to switch to Chitika, but to my disappointment Chitika was no were near to adsense. Their eCPM was low. But had good results for traffic coming mostly from search engine and on product niche sites.
Related Read:
An Interview with Chitika(CHIH-tih-ka)
Make Money Online: Revisit Chitika
Best Pay Per Click Network- Bidding System (Bidvertiser)
Bidvertiser
Bidvertiser was yet another ad network which I tried out of curiosity and was better than Chitika on Technotip.org Their ebay ads started converting and I started earning good income!
Other small networks
I tried some other smaller ad networks and none of them even matched Chitika and Bidvertiser.
Yahoo! Bing Network
After long time I signed up for Media.net – it serves contextual ads from Yahoo! Bing Network. The name Yahoo! brought my attention and I finally signed up for it. First 2 days everything looked very promising – RPM of $0.2 But after 2 days RPM turned to be $0 and it continued for 20-25 days. I was deeply disappointed by the earnings and the ads that were being displayed. Atleast I had expected some kind of ad relevancy with the content.
When I wrote to their support team they replied on time and they asked me to wait for a month before I could see some results and relevancy of ads. It seems that, their server was still under learning mode!
After waiting for 35-40 days I checked it once again. This time I was satisfied with the ads and I was surprised with the earnings too. It wasn’t very high by the way, but better than what I had expected from an adnetwork other than adsense.
Bonus
You’ll earn a BONUS of 10% on your earnings up till 3 months from the date of sign-up, if you sign up from this link Media.net
Features
1. Highly customizable ads – you can set the ad size, color.
Sizes:
336×280
300×250
728×90
600×250
160×600
728×20
600×120
468×60
120×600
120×300
300×600
160×90
180×150
200×200
250×250
2. There are a collection of awesome looking ad skins which you can select from or you can create your own using the color pallets.
3. You can set other network ads as your back up ads when there are no relevant ads media.net can serve.
4. Mobile Docked Ads: Monetize traffic from all devices once enabled.
5. Desktop Interstitial Ads:
i. Choose between a lightbox interstitial implementation, or a welcome ad format for a non-intrusive experience.
ii. Fully control the timer, frequency and other parameters for triggering the ad.
iii. Completely customize the look-and-feel of the ad unit.
Bonus
You’ll earn a BONUS of 10% on your earnings up till 3 months from the date of sign-up, if you sign up from this link Media.net