Since its arrival a few years ago, Casale Media has established itself as one of the most reputable ad networks around. At first they offered only pop-based advertising but rolled out other media formats later. They currently support leaderboards (728x90), skyscrapers (120x600) and medium rectangles (300x250).
This great network easily compares to Value Click in quality of their offering - unlike many of the other networks offering pops today, they do not leave it up to the publisher to do frequency capping of pop-unders with javascript, but rather have an easy setting to configure just how often your visitors see the ads. This not only removes the hassle from implementing their code, but also ensures that you never show your visitors ads that you don't get paid for.
The pops themselves are also note-worthy for being of higher quality and smaller size than many other pop networks offer. Rarely if at all will Casale Media open up a full website in a popup window.
The payout rates for popunders are comparable to what we are currently seeing from Value Click's pops - campaigns average out to $3.50 - $5 CPM gross, of which Casale Media takes a flat 30% cut. The remaining 70% is yours and in our case works out to between $2.50 and $3 CPM.
Their "in-page" ad formats which were introduced later, pay out at levels comparable to Value Click as well: We are seeing about $0.40 - $0.50 CPM for leaderboards, and $0.30 - $0.45 for skyscrapers. Rectangles give better rates of $0.60 - $0.80 CPM. Naturally, every site will see different results depending on content, demographics and performance.
The network's minimum monthly payment is set at $25, though of course you can set it higher should you not wish to hassle with chum change.
The statistics interface is also very reminicent of Value Click: you get real-time display of daily and monthly earnings, with details reports available by site and date. You can apply with multiple sites under the same account, and the statistics are tracked separately for easy viewing.
There's also a breakdown by format.
Casale Media has a referrer program, giving you 5% of the earnings of any publisher or deposits of any advertiser that you refer to them. These programs rarely contribute significantly to the bottom line, but are a nice little bonus if you have a number of webmaster friends.
A note-worthy point is Casale Media's ad code options. You get a chunk of javascript to place into your pages, or if you wish to use Casale's ads as defaults for another network, they give you a single javascript URL to use for popunders, or the urls for image and link tags for the standard formats. This is a very convenient feature for anyone who has ever scratched their heads pondering various networks complex default mechanisms.
Casale's own default mechanism is powerful and flexible if a bit flawed due to the nature of ad serving. You are able to define default campaigns per site per format (so default skyscrapers for site A can be different from those on site B). They even let you treat defaults as full featured campaigns at no charge, defining frequency and date capping, geotargeting and other parameters.
Where the unfortunate flaw comes in has to do with the way ads are served. Because Casale puts the ads inside an IFrame, your defaults will appear in that frame as well. This works great from the standpoint of having the page load quicker, but unfortunately means that any default ad will look like it's being loaded from a page on Casale's servers. Any ad network that does hostname validation will have then think the ads are improperly invoked. (A workaround for Value Click and any other network that supports this, is to request "casalemedia.com" to be placed on the list of approved site aliases - we have done this, and everything seems ok so far.) The other limitation of IFraming ads is that you can no longer run wide skyscrapers (such as those offered by Value Click) as a default for Casale's regular scrapers. (Note that you can still chain them the other way, 160 to 120.)
One other thing worth mentioning about the default mechanism, is that while you get to configure a lot of options for your default campaigns, there doesn't seem to be a way to add more than one of them for a particular site/format combination. So if you set up a default campaign for all US-based leaderboard traffic, you cannot then create a campaign to handle all other countries.
The application process is very straightforward, and we got the answer the next day. It is our belief that as Casale Media gains more publishers, they may become more selective of who they accept, so apply early!
Payments have been coming in a regular and timely manner, so there are no concerns there, which is very reassuring for a new network.
In all, this is a great network that we highly recommend. The rates we are currently seeing lead us to suggest you use Casale Media as default for Fastclick - however depending you your mileage, you may wish to swap the two. We will wait with anticipation for this great network to start offering other media formats.
Casale Media 
