If you use Firefox for your main browser, as I do, you may want to check out ScribeFire. This free plugin is a an easy blog editor that allows you to easily write new posts, edit one ones and even create pages (WordPress) all from the comfort of your browser. It pulls its spell-checking from Firefox and doesn’t take up much processing and makes managing multiple blogs a snap.

But the ease of blogging with ScribeFire pales in comparison with a great new idea that they are testing out called QuickAds. The idea behind Quick Ads is that you turn the monetizing of your blog or website over to them. Once you allocate the webspace to ads, QuickAds decides, based on the content of your site (or the given blog post) which ad from one of many ad networks to run in that location. Google Adsense Ads are in the rotation (you can chose to earn on your own account or the “house” account as they call it) but so are several others like Shopping.com, Kontera, Advertising.com and more. The earnings from these ads are given to the web publisher with QuickAds taking a cut.

If you don’t have time to waste with trying out multiple ad sponsors to find the one that makes you the most profit, this is a great idea, if it works. It also gives you flexibility of having multiple ads from multiple partners so the ads are more attention getting. I add the doubt in because, in the day since I have set this up, I have already run into a few issues which we will get into in a moment.

What is nice about it is that they have a drop and drag interface for placing ads that makes it very simple, even if you don’t have any HTML knowledge.

A few issues I noticed right off the bat:

• I added a couple of ads to this post as a test. About half the time I look at this page, several of these links show up as broken images. That looks terrible and sure isn’t going to make me any money. Could just be a fluke, though, as most of the time they look fine.
• All the ads I place look centered in FireFox (which is how I would like them to show) but left oriented on IE. I would like them to look consistant. There is a QuickAds ad at the bottom of this post before the comments and at the base of the blog. Are they showing as centered in your browser?
• As cool as the drag and drop placement feature is, it has its limits. I wish they also offered a bit of code that would enable you to add ads with more flexibility.
• The fact that the Google ads aren’t in my color scheme annoy me but that may just be because I am a control freak. 😉
• They limit you to only three different ad sizes. I understand that this is to have the most cross-over between all their ad networks but this is slightly limiting. It also has the strange side effect that sometimes the wrong size ad loads into the box. I am hoping they are working on this because it looks terrible when this happens. 

At the moment, my biggest frustration is that QuickAds looks much better in FireFox than in Internet Explorer. I understand that they are likely designing for the FireFox crowd but most people still us IE so to not consider this is poor planning.

I am excited about the idea of it, however, and willing to give it a try and see how it does. If you run into weird issues with any of these ads (off center, loading wrong size ad, broken image, looks ugly, slows down site, etc) please let me know in the comments. Also, if you are using this service and something is working for you or not, please let me know!