The Daily Dinar

For Muslim blogs interested in moneterizing their site there are two principle hurdles to the use of contextual advertising, such as Google Adsense. The first is that the advertisters who explicitly target placement on Islamic or Muslim websites are often promoting ideas that many Muslims would find objectionable, such as advertisements for books and websites critical of Islam. The second issue is that the ads that do appear are often extremely low paying. Therefore, most Muslim bloggers or webmasters would decide that the ‘cost’ of cluttering their site with ads is much greater than the likely revenue.

There are, however, alternatives. The recently launched AuctionAds [affl] is one of them. AuctionAds serves ads for eBay auctions with the publisher (webmaster) getting a percentage of the fees on any successful auctions. As they explain:

When your site’s visitors click on an Auction Ad listing and take an action on eBay you earn cash. Actions are defined as a Winning Bid, a Buy-it-Now or a confirmed user registration. AuctionAds is committed to paying out a minimum of 100% of eBay commission revenue. See eBay’s affiliate program for details on the payout.

The ads come in a variety of shapes and sizes and can, like Google Adsense, be customised to suit your site. What makes this especially good for Muslims is that you can specify the keywords for the products you want displayed. For example, you can limit it to ipods, books or even Arabic or Islamic material. That gives webmasters far greater control over what gets displayed on their website. For example, here’s an ad for auctions based on the search word ‘Quran’: