Ad networks are referred to as an information medium. The main task of advertising networks is to serve as a middleman for websites that want to host advertisements and those that wanted to advertise their services. There are different ad networks around. And for forum monetization, there are only a handful of ad networks that you should consider enlisting up with.

Forums are usually a part of a website that allows members to interact with each other on a given topic. Forums are dynamic. It makes a website lively, well-populated, and of course, well-visited. And primary because of these reasons, there are stand alone forums nowadays. Stand alone forums are complete websites that is not linked in anyway with a product or a service. Its main purpose is to simply connect internet users that have the same line of interest with each other.

If you are concerned about monetizing your forum and are looking for ad networks to help you with it, here are the top ad networks that you should consider:

1. AdSense
AdSense works under the search engine giant Google. Google is the most used search engine today. AdSense offers contextual advertising. Google maintains a special server with robots to crawl the content of a particular webpage so that it will be able to deliver only the ads that matches the content of your site. Google has a big number of participating websites that are willing to pay for every click generated. All you really have to do is to strategically put those ads that came from the Google ad network into your site. When you reach $100, you are going to get paid through paper check.

2. AdBrite
Adbrite basically works like Google AdSense. Publishers can simply choose the necessary ad formats to host. The ads can be in the form of text, banner, or even active interstitials. The only difference between AdBrite and AdSense is that the visitors to your site can directly buy ads from you. All they have to do is to click on the necessary links and AdBrite’s sales staff would be there to accommodate them. AdBrite doesn’t restrict publishers to show only ads coming from them unlike Google.

3. Burst Media
Burst Media has been working for the past eleven years in converging advertisers, publishers, and even media professionals. Burst Media can be termed as the advertising network for the elite. Their clients are ESPN, Disney, BellSouth, Pontiac, Sketchers, and Microsoft, among others. Their service is powered by Burst Direct, the division that is tasked to deploy the online campaigns generated by advertises across all other sites that belong to the network.

4. Yahoo Publisher Network
Google’s closest rival when it comes to search engine preference would be Yahoo. And of course, Yahoo also has their advertising network in place. Yahoo allows publishers, and in this case, forum owners to monetize their site through content matches and ads in RSS feed. The latter is a feature that Google AdSense doesn’t support just yet. Yahoo also offers different payment options to their publishers. Aside from check, users can select direct deposits and payouts through PayPal, the most popular payment processor in the internet today. Publishers can also choose to use the money they earned through the ad clicks for their own advertising needs.

5. The Microsoft adCenter

Google and Yahoo maybe the search engine giants. But Microsoft is the software king. Whatever somebody can do, Microsoft does better. And that’s why they have MSN and now, the Microsoft adCenter. The Microsoft adCenter is a type of a pay per click advertising that can be used for forum monetization. The only disadvantage of their program is that they are rather new so there won’t be many publishers and advertisers that are part of the network just yet.

These are the different ad networks of choice that you can use to monetize your forums with. Generally, you are only allowed to choose one of them. Doing so is also advisable, because you will have all your revenues directed only to one program. As such, you will get to the minimum payout faster, allowing you to cash out profits quite easily.