There are advantages and disadvantages of both Safelist and Text Ad Exchages:
A Safelist consists of the name and email addresses of Internet users who have specifically agreed to receive emails from other members on this list. It is basically a community of Internet marketers who have joined to profit from one another by mutually exchanging marketing messages.
Advantage:
joining any Safelist is that anyone could immediately come to a list of thousands of people who can mail to without being accused of spamming.
Disadvantage:
Is that these are not a targeted public because the vast majority would have opted-in to the list in an interest to promote their own products rather than read and respond to the promotions of their fellow list members.
As a Safelist member a person has to face the fact of receiving hundreds of mails every day and that person has to spend a lot of time to clear his inbox. Most Safelist services have in their Terms of Service that a bounced email due to a overfilled inbox leads to an immediate cancellation of membership.
There are still people who use the Safelist approach, and use it successfully.
On the other hand Text ads are usually exchanged in a reciprocal agreement between two sites. Banners are often dynamically rotated, text is often hard-coded onto a page.
There are no Text Ads Exchanges as big as the major banner exchanges. However, there are some networks willing to give it a try. Text Ads Exchanges hope to combine the vast reach of their banner counterparts with the high response rates of text ads, plus the added benefit of multiple exposures per page. While this may sound good in theory, the same caveats about other exchanges still apply. Make sure you are getting a good value, and make doubly sure the ad exchange does not diminish from your site.
In my opinion Safelist would be safe and best
Hope my answer would satify your question.
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There are advantages and disadvantages of both Safelist and Text Ad Exchages:
A Safelist consists of the name and email addresses of Internet users who have specifically agreed to receive emails from other members on this list. It is basically a community of Internet marketers who have joined to profit from one another by mutually exchanging marketing messages.
Advantage:
joining any Safelist is that anyone could immediately come to a list of thousands of people
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