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The following is a paid review and is my complete and honest opinion. If you would like your own paid review on my blog please visit the advertise page.

Tyler Cruz is an internet entrepreneur like myself, and the focus of today’s post is a website called PublisherSpot, which is one of Tyler’s flagship startup websites. PublisherSpot is a free online review directory for advertising networks as well as affiliate networks.

Tyler created PublisherSpot because he was a member of numerous webmaster forums over the years and could not find a quality information site that reviewed the advertising networks he would later experiment with. According to Archive.org, PublisherSpot first started sometime around November of 2006.

Tyler started off by paying others $35 to write in-depth reviews about any advertising agency, but has later changed to a strict review process for the present day reviews.

According to the email Tyler sent me, they now spend between 6-12+ hours reviewing each network. They create a new anonymous account to gauge the sign-up process, the customer support, and the overall look and feel of the website.

On every professionally reviewed network page, users are allowed to vote a 1 to a 10 for how well they like the company. At the end of the day, this allows you to get a professionally reviewed opinion of the network, as well as the communities overall vote of it. The only downside to this is that after a company is reviewed by PublisherSpot, they generally make a post about it on their blog to increase 10 out of 10 votes, much like any other public voting process. If I was looking for solid advice about a network, I would realistically take the professionally written advice rather than a 1 to 10 voting number from the readers.

So far, PublisherSpot has reviewed 37 advertising and affiliate networks. You can easily find them through PublisherSpot’s useful search page. You can search by the types of ad formats (creatives) the companies provide, the type of payout, how often they pay you, what categories they have, as well as the user-voted rating for them. This makes it easy to briefly skip over the dead-beat advertising agencies so that you can read in-depth reviews of the higher ranking ones.

The two most recent additions to the site are the blog and the forum, although so far they are both very inactive. A commentator named Nick said that Tyler should have just integrated PublisherForums.com (also Tyler’s) into the site, rather than having two forums about publishers and monetizing websites. The commentator argues that Publisherforums.com is dead on its own, and he fears that the PublisherSpot forums wont take off either. Hopefully Tyler will work hard at building both of these sections of the site, but so far they are like a ghost town.

My Opinion
As nice as the site sounds towards helping people make the best decision possible about which networks to join, at the end of the day it is just a well search engine optimized content site aimed at getting Tyler Cruz a bunch of affiliate referrals so that he makes a bunch of money when you start making a bunch of money. The site may guide those who are incredibly new to making websites for a living, but for anyone who has ever even tried Google Adsense, it is just a collection of affiliate-linked landing pages.

One thing that I would add to the site would be user comments. While it is interesting to see a 1 to 10 system where the public can vote on how nice a company is, I believe it would be even more beneficial to be able to read someones rant about how the company stole $200 from them, rather than just seeing that a few people voted them a 1 out of 10. It would give the agency, as well as those who use it, their own public opinion.

Conclusion
PublisherSpot is a well designed site that has a lot of unique content that is search engine optimized. With all of the agencies allowing Tyler to make money through referring people to the networks, I have no doubt in my mind he will be able to make a good chunk of money over time from the referrals he gets from Google. However, Publisherspot is only a pagerank 3 (even with 2 years of age), and so if I were Tyler I would build a ton of links to the site so that every page ranked a lot higher which would ultimately make him more money in the long run. Tyler, to get you started you should invest a few hours reading the link building cookbook.

If you would like to state your own opinion, I would love to hear it in the comments. Have any of you used PublisherSpot in the past? What would you like to see added to it? Do you agree with the reviews that Tyler has written? — This sort of closing is what I meant when I said I would like to see user comments Tyler, it would really add to your site.

PS: Tyler Cruz also blogs about his journey to wealth over at TylerCruz.com, of which is one of the blogs that I subscribe to. You can also read his post about the updates he did to Publisherspot at his most recent post .