Review of RealTechNetwork
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Updated - 11/03/2008
Go to www.realtechmedia.com
Formed in 2004, the network now has 6,700 active publishers and serves 18.4 billion impressions per month, making it a fairly popular ad network among owners of large sites.
A very focused advertising network, RealTechNetwork is not meant for someone who likes to micromanage their advertisements. They offer only two types of advertisement, CPC and CPM, and publishers are not offered many ways in which to customize the appearance of these advertisements, or even to choose which kinds of advertisements go on their sites.
The network does, however, offer geo-targeting of advertisements, which is useful since it represents publishers on every continent. It also promises 100% sell-through of all ad spots.
RealTechNetwork makes managing ad space easy at the expense of the ability to customize and control ads, but is great for a publisher who is more concerned with running their large site than tweaking their ads.
As previously noted, RealTechNetwork is better at taking care of all aspects of advertising for its publishers rather than offering them many ways in which to control the ads. A few options, however, are available through the control panel, which can be accessed through the main site.
Publishers may choose what size ads they wish to have appear on their site, as well as the types of ads. They may also cap the frequency of the appearance of any ads, and can link categories or ad types into channels in order to make their revenues easier to summarize and analyze in reports.
Other changes require site owners to submit emails (called “tickets” by this network) through the network’s main site. To add additional sites to an account, or to block specific campaigns from appearing on a site, publishers must submit these tickets and get approval from support.
RealTechNetwork offers a few different ad types and formats, and their basic ads come in a variety of sizes. Ads are available as a leaderboard (728 x 90), a standard banner (468 x 60), a half page ad (300 x 600), a medium rectangle (300 x 250), a small cube (180 x 150), a wide skyscraper (160 x 600), a skyscraper (120 x 600). Also available are a pop-under (720 x 300), an interstitial, and an expandable leaderboard (728 x 90). Finally, RealTechNetwork offers in-page video ads (300 x 250 or 728 x 90), streaming 15 and 30 second video-rolls (pre, mid, or post), and a mobile web advertising service that is currently in BETA.
RealTechNetwork offers a referral program, but it requires publishers to complete a separate, albeit simple, application in order to take advantage of this service. Once accepted into the program, members receive 5% of referred advertisers’ expenditures and 5% of referred publishers’ earnings for life.
Instead of having a complex system of charts and graphs available in the control panel to report revenues, this ad network again gives its publishers a more hands-off approach to managing their advertising. While the network does offer real-time statistics, publishers must generate reports either in a new window or an email in order to view this information, rather than having it appear immediately. The reports say that they can take up to 30 minutes to generate, but a fairly simple test report took less than one minute to create.
Publishers may choose the date range they wish to examine in their report, and can break the information down by campaign, ad spot, channel, ad dimensions, country, day, hour, or page. Old reports are saved in the user’s control panel. While the reports do allow site owners to examine a number of aspects of their advertisements, they are not as detailed as those offered by some other sites, nor are they as simple to understand. This makes sense, however, because RealTechNetwork does not allow publishers as much control over their ads; they therefore do not need as much information about the ads that they are running.
Like most advertising networks, RealTechNetwork requires an online application to join, but their requirements for acceptance are unusually stringent, particularly in the area of site impressions per month. To be accepted, sites must receive at least 25,000 impressions on average per month, with 12,500 of those being unique.
Sites also must have root level domains and be free of adult, illegal, or hateful content. They can only be written in English, cannot be blogs, and cannot offer incentives of any kind for viewing or clicking on ads.
RealTechNetwork does not accept applications from free email accounts, and they require the receipt a W8 or W9 form from the site publisher before they will issue any payments. Finally, they only accept sites that cater to specific markets, but the range of these markets is so broad that almost all sites will not have a problem meeting this requirement.
Payments are processed on the 25th day of each month for the previous month’s revenues. They are distributed via ACH direct deposit (US customers only but expanding soon), check, PayPal, or wire transfer. The network gives its publishers 70% of the revenues generated by their ad space, keeping 30%. The minimum payment amount each month is $20.
Support for RealTechNetwork is only available by the aforementioned “tickets,” which are basically emails through the website. There also exists, however, a knowledgebase, which is basically a forum monitored by both other users and company representatives.
RealTechNetwork definitely caters to owners of large sites who do not wish to spend a lot of time agonizing over the details of their advertising. While this means that they do not offer a lot of control their publishers, it also allows them to offer lucrative formats like the video advertisement from prominent publishers and to guarantee that ad spaces will be filled.
Large site owners should consider joining this network, especially if they are more interested in managing their site than their ads.
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