Can You Make Money Using The BuySellAds Platform?

Yes. No. It depends. Any platform that has existed for more than a year or two - long enough for the scams to either become obvious or to fold - can be used to make money. The only question is, can you do it?

What Is BuySellAds?

When you own a blog and you want to make money, you have a few options. You can go insane and develop a product, make deals to manufacture it, set up a storefront, and sell it to customers. You can do all of that, but with a digital product. You can sell high-end content in the form of books, both print and digital. You can run affiliate links to products you want to recommend. You can pretend to be a storefront while operating a dropshipping business. Or you can take the easy way out and simply run pay-per-view or pay-per-click advertising on your site.

When you decide that advertising is the way to go, the first thing you discover is that there are a lot of different ad platforms you can potentially use. Most of them work the way Google’s AdSense works; you put some ad code on your site, you fill out a few simple informational boxes with the ad network, and they scan your site. Based on your content, traffic, and performance, the ad network runs advertising on your site. You get paid either per view or per click, and the amount depends on the number of people, the quality of your site, and a dozen other factors.

AdSense remains one of the most well-known options, but it’s run by Google, which means there are strict limitations attached to it. If you cross a line, break a rule, or land in the wrong niche, Google is very likely to shut down your account and effectively blacklist your site.

If you can’t use AdSense, or if you’re simply exploring other options, one that frequently comes up is BuySellAds. What is it and how does it work?

When you run advertising through a traditional network like Google, they handle a lot of the work on the back end. Advertisers pay an amount set by Google based on your site, for access to a site they might not even know by name. You get ads running on your page, but you aren’t really given a transparent list of who’s advertising or why.

BuySellAds operates differently. It’s more of a marketplace than an automatic placement network. Think of it as a curated meeting point between publishers and advertisers, where both sides know exactly what they’re getting into.

With BuySellAds, advertisers sign up looking for sites they can run ads on. They have an idea of their budget, their niche, and how much traffic they want to reach for those figures.

Meanwhile, publishers - that’s people like you, with a blog you want to monetize - sign up with an informational profile about their site. They list monthly traffic, pricing expectations, niche, and other vital statistics.

BuySellAds sits in the middle, linking advertisers with publishers. When both sides are a match on the platform, deals move forward with all the key information - cost, niche, and traffic - presented upfront. Contracts are simplified because everything runs through the BuySellAds platform.

That’s the simplified version. In practice, advertisers create specific ad units that publishers can choose to run, based on price, niche fit, and whether they think the ad will actually perform well for their audience. There are a whole range of different formats available too.

The end result is a hybrid of a self-serve ad platform and an automated solution. You still have to go out and find ads to run on your site, find ads that will pay enough assuming you get clicks, and find ads that fit your content well enough that you actually will get clicks. Running an ad that doesn’t convert does you no good at all.

Publishers are able to sell specific ad slots for advertisers to fill. Beyond traditional desktop ads, you can sell advertising space for mobile websites, mobile apps, RSS feeds, sponsored content, and more. You retain approval over both the creative and the pricing, so nothing goes live on your site without your sign-off.

What Makes BuySellAds Less Viable?

Some people are always skeptical of large advertising platforms, and with good reason. There are advertisers out there looking to throw low-quality ads onto publisher sites that haven’t set proper limits. They’ll only pay a fraction of what your traffic is worth, but they don’t care because it’s functionally cheap traffic for them. That said, as a publisher, you’re able to set a price threshold that blocks out the worst offenders, and with your veto power over ad creative, you can avoid content that would embarrass your site or annoy your readers. If you’re careless, the ads will be terrible - but you’re reading this. You’re not the careless type.

Reasons You Could Be Rejected

There is a list of reasons why BuySellAds will reject your site.

They tend to favor sites focused on tech, web design, development, or freelancing, though they’ve expanded over the years. Sites in more off-the-wall niches may still struggle to find enough matching advertisers to make it worthwhile.

• They tend to reject sites with very low monthly impressions. Somewhere around 100,000 monthly impressions is a common benchmark, though there’s some flexibility.
• They will reject sites that are under construction, incomplete, or that don’t have fresh, regularly updated content.
• They will reject sites containing illegal content, questionable content, or pornography.
• They generally reject sites not published in English, largely to simplify support operations.
• They often reject sites already cluttered with a lot of low-quality, untargeted ads.
• They reject sites on shared domains, such as .wordpress.com and .blogspot.com.

So there are real barriers to entry here. If your niche is too far outside their advertiser base, or your traffic isn’t there yet, you’re going to have a hard time. And even if you are accepted, there’s still the chance that no advertisers are willing to pay to be on your specific site. You can’t make money if no one is willing to pay you.

You also need to be quite careful about the price thresholds you set. Once you’re in the network as a publisher, keep a close eye on your minimums. You’re investing time and energy into managing these ad relationships - make sure you’re earning enough to justify that investment.

Notes to First Time BuySellAds Users

If you had no ads before, adding them might affect your existing conversion rates. People who previously clicked through to your affiliate links or book sales might now leave via an ad instead. That’s a real tradeoff to consider.

The math matters here: if adding ads to your site reduces your book sales or affiliate commissions, you need the ad revenue to more than cover that loss. Otherwise you’re simply cannibalizing one revenue stream to fund another.

Keep in mind that, as a middleman platform, BuySellAds charges a commission. Publishers keep 75% of generated revenue, with BuySellAds taking a 25% cut. The minimum payout threshold is $20 via PayPal, $50 by check, and $500 for wire transfer. Earnings typically appear in your account approximately 30 days after an ad space is purchased, with payouts credited within 2-3 days of your request. You can cash out up to twice per month.

One of the biggest strengths of BuySellAds is transparency. You can see exactly who is trying to buy ad space on your site, and you can reject specific ads or entire advertisers at your discretion. No one gets on your site without your approval. Advertisers who aren’t willing to create quality ads or pay competitive rates simply don’t last on the platform.

To put the scale of this in perspective: BuySellAds now serves over 6 billion ad impressions per month and works with more than 12,000 advertisers. Real publisher results back this up too - Axios has earned over $100,000 in added revenue through the platform, The Daily Tonic uncovered more than $30,000 in previously untapped revenue, and Fantasy Life exceeded $25,000 in supplemental ad revenue within a single quarter. CodePen consistently grows quarterly revenue by over 10% through BuySellAds. These aren’t outliers - they’re examples of what’s possible when the right publisher meets the right advertisers on a well-matched platform.

You are also able to stack up potential advertisers. If you have three ad slots on your blog posts and can rotate multiple ads through each on a monthly basis, you could have a meaningful number of advertisers paying you simultaneously, plus a waiting list of pre-approved buyers ready to step in when a slot opens up. To see how this fits into a broader strategy, check out these ways to increase your blog’s revenue earnings.

Be cautious with waiting lists, though. If you lock in a deal at a fixed price and demand for your site increases, you can raise your rates going forward - but existing locked-in agreements have to be honored at the original price first. Plan your pricing with room to grow.

Making Money as an Advertiser

I’ve written most of the above from the publisher perspective, but advertisers can absolutely make money through BuySellAds as well. Why would anyone advertise if they couldn’t turn a profit?

As an advertiser, the goal is straightforward: the revenue from incoming traffic needs to outweigh what you’re spending to acquire it. The key is balancing the quality of the publishers you choose against what you’re paying for their ad space. Targeted, well-crafted ads on relevant sites will always outperform cheap placements on loosely related ones.

The platform’s transparency actually works in advertisers’ favor too. You know exactly what kind of site you’re advertising on, what the audience looks like, and what you’re paying. There’s no black box - which makes it easier to optimize and scale what’s working.

Results May Vary

As with any advertising network, your results will depend on a lot of factors specific to your site. You won’t make money from BuySellAds if you can’t get accepted onto the platform in the first place. If your traffic isn’t engaged - or if a large portion of your audience uses ad blockers - you’ll find it hard to generate meaningful revenue regardless of how good your ad placements look on paper.

On the other hand, if you have a solid site in a well-defined niche with a loyal audience, BuySellAds can work remarkably well. Advertisers who want exactly your audience will seek you out, and the direct marketplace model means you can command far more per click or per month than you’d ever get from an automated bidding system. The ceiling here is genuinely higher than what most bloggers realize - as long as you’re willing to put in the work to manage it properly.