Clickio (Adsense Alternative) Review

Clickio is an advertising platform that manages the ads on your website to get more revenue from your ad inventory. I have been using them for about a month now and I am very pleased with what they have done for me so far so I decided to write a review.

How I discovered Clickio

I discovered Clickio purely by chance – I was looking for a GDPR cookie plugin for WordPress and I signed up on their website because I thought this is what they provided. I’m not sure why I thought of this, but I was contacted by their Director of Publisher Development, Lindsay Smith.

He told me what they did and asked if I would like to join. He was hesitant because he didn’t know much about the company, so I said I’d consider it in the fall (it was spring when we first got in touch).

Lindsay wasn’t pushy and agreed to my wishes and I forgot about it. Then I got another email from Spring asking if I wanted to consider a partnership. I agreed to move one of my smaller websites to the Clickio platform for a month as a trial.

How did Clickio perform?

After a slow start (which Lindsay warned me would happen), Clickio’s systems kicked into high gear, and as the month progressed, revenue increased to exceed what I had been earning from Google Adsense.

adsense income

The following screenshot shows the revenue generated by my Adsense test site in October 2021:

As you can see, it’s around 50 USD per day.

Click Revenue

The following screenshot shows the income obtained the following month after switching to Clickio (until November 26):

It wasn’t until around week four that I started seeing significant improvements in revenue, but it was significantly higher than what I was getting from Google. Hopefully this level of income will continue, but I’ll be back to update this post in a month or so when I’ve had a chance to test Clickio for a longer period of time.

How Click Works

I don’t claim to understand exactly how Clickio works, personally I don’t care as long as it makes me more money, but I have tried to provide a brief description below.

Clickio uses many of the same technologies as Google Adsense. However, they have a larger supply of ad partners and therefore there is more competition for ad space. header offers they mean inventory can be offered to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously, leading to higher revenue.

Requirements to be accepted as a Clickio member

Unfortunately, Clickio has higher entry requirements than Adsense. At the time of writing this article, Lindsay informed me that to be accepted as a partner, websites must:

• Get a minimum of 100,000 page views per month
• be earning at least $500 through Adsense

What are the disadvantages of Clickio?

The above entry requirements mean that only the largest sites can benefit from Clickio’s services.

Also, I found that my website was a bit slower when using Clickio ads; this may be due to header-on-demand offers. Not excruciatingly slow, but there was a noticeable difference.

By default, Clickio also has a NET60 payment cycle. This means that the income I earn in November will not be credited to my bank account until the end of January, essentially a 3-month lead time.

For me, it was a long time to wait, particularly because I didn’t know much about the company and whether there would be payment issues or realized earnings would be significantly lower than estimated earnings. It also meant that I would not be moving any more of my sites to Clickio until I had experienced their payment processing.

However, Lindsay very kindly offered to change my settings to NET30, which will bring it in line with Google’s payout timeline: my November earnings will now be paid out at the end of December.

Verdict

I have been using Clickio for almost a month now and from what I have seen so far I am clearly very impressed with it and am considering moving more of my sites to their platform. However, before doing so, I need to be sure that:

• earnings will still be better than they would have been through Adsense
• no problems during payment processing

Therefore, I will update this article in the New Year to reflect what happened during the New Year.

Update: January 2022

So, I’ve just finished my review of Clickio’s performance over the past few months, and as promised, I’ll share my experience.

The following table shows the session RPM (revenue per 1,000 sessions) that this particular website has earned over the past six months:

Note: January data only covers dates between January 1 and yesterday (January 18).

I switched to Clickio in early November and you can see that the earnings were on par with what I was earning from Adsense, despite a slow start when Clickio’s AI kicked in and waited for header bids to kick in.

December revenue was much higher than expected (around 25% increase compared to Adsense revenue).

Unfortunately, January earnings showed a decline; however, this could well be a seasonal variation because display advertising revenues are often down at this time of year as advertisers adjust their strategies and budgets after a busy holiday period.

In addition to the performance in terms of revenue, I also noticed a change in the performance of the website in terms of speed and user experience. The introduction of Clickio advertising appears to have improved performance for mobile users, but the experience for desktop users has been poorer. In addition to being noticed by website owners, it is also noted in Core Web Vitals reports as shown below:

These changes coincide with the time I started using Clickio (early November); no other changes have been made to the website during this time.

Regarding the payment, my earnings went directly to my account on December 29 with no problems.

So what is my position with Clickio now?

November and December showed improvements over Adsense, but this month seems to have slowed down a bit. Therefore, I have decided to postpone the transfer of more of my websites to Clickio until I have collected more data (the RPM of the January session already shows signs of recovery). Also, I want to address website speed issues before moving forward.