AdSense: The (Weak) Elephant in the Room
A few years ago, we spoke of the "AdSense Economy." It was so simple. Create a website, slap on an AdSense widget, and voila: "Insta-biz." Wow! Who knew business could be so simple? AdSense was proof of Google's genius, having grown into a multi-billion dollar business in only a few years after its launch in 2003. Google's search business continues to grow in dominance, and the company's apps business is putting a serious dent in Microsoft's franchise.
But cracks are appearing in AdSense. AdSense is 30% of Google's revenue, so this matters. Any weakness in AdSense is important for Google's investors as well as advertisers, publishers, users, and entrepreneurs.
Three Constituents Who Need to Be Kept Happy
AdSense was a runaway success because it met the needs of online publishers, advertisers, and users all at once:
- Publishers could get revenue simply by pasting a widget on their website.
- Advertisers could extend their performance-based search-driven advertising, which they already knew and liked, across the Web.
- Users began to see ads that actually made sense in the context of what they were reading, and many of the ads came from smaller advertisers whose products and services would not have otherwise reached them.
But each of these constituents is starting to see problems with AdSense. Let's start with publishers.
Publishers
BtoB Magazine published an article on June 5th titled "Declining revenue has publishers rethinking Google AdSense." It quotes many B2B publishers who echo the conclusion that revenue from AdSense is no longer meaningful to them, that it does not "move the needle." This is less a reflection of AdSense's decline than the fact that traditional publishers have gotten smarter about how to sell advertising online. They have had to. Print is in decline, and the Internet is their only hope. Getting some "spare change" from AdSense may have been okay in the past, but they need a lot more now. Plenty of good alternatives exist on other advertising networks, and publishers are getting a lot smarter, too, about selling directly to their consumers.
Who cares about traditional B2B publishers that are migrating online, you say? What about those big native-online publishers? Well, Facebook just hired the guy who masterminded AdSense, but don't expect too see AdSense ads there. Rupert Murdoch wouldn't like to be thrown scraps of revenue for MySpace with a partner that makes all the rules. And one couldn't imagine Twitter pasting AdSense ads on its network. What large online publisher could get a meaningful amount of its revenue from AdSense?
Back in around 2006, all you needed to do to get VC funding was build a website that got user traction. "What about revenue?" they'd ask. "AdSense," you'd say. "Okay, then, here's the term sheet." Anybody try that with a VC lately?
Ah, so it's all about the long tail, right? Yes, a lone blogger has few other options. Everything else takes too much effort. They are not making a living from it, so they are satisfied with "spare change." Many of the alternatives to AdSense seem rather scammy, along the lines of, "Make a lot of money working from home." Google is well respected as a brand, and everyone knows what they'll be getting from AdSense. Don't they?
Actually, most people don't know one very important part of the deal: the percentage of the revenue that the publisher gets. You can parse the data from Google's financial filings in aggregate. But knowing its percentage in aggregate does not matter to a publisher. Google may be giving a great deal to a large publisher with clout. What do you, the little guy, get? You may know how much Google is paying you for the clicks that you generate, but do you know how much the advertisers are paying for those clicks? If you get $100, did advertisers have to pay Google $200? Did you get 50%? Was it only 10%? Maybe Google sold the clicks you generated for $1,000, and you got 10% of it? How would that feel?
To Google and its investors (more about them later) this ability to simply turn a lever and get a bigger percentage of revenue is marvelous. Who would not want that kind of pricing power? But to your average publisher, it seems to violate one of the most basic rules of business: knowing the terms of the deal, knowing who gets what.
The long tail is also where the problem of click fraud is most serious. To protect it, Google will (quite rightly) sue publishers who scam the system. But now publishers are suing back, and winning. This is ugly stuff.
In another murky corner of the Internet are "made for AdSense" sites that scrape other publishers to generate ad clicks. This is also considered click fraud.
So, the long tail looks rather like fishing in a murky bottom, full of nasty catches, and hardly a bright future for a great company like Google.
Advertisers
Hang on. Get real, you say. None of this matters because Google sells more advertising than any other company, and that's all that matters, right? Publishers, big and small, will take whatever Google gives them because Google has advertisers locked up.
Yes, that is true in search. Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft, nor any of the myriad of search startups, has made a dent in search advertising. AdWords reigns supreme.
Not so fast, though. First, some perspective. Traditional brand-based advertising is still bigger than search advertising, which is why Google bought DoubleClick. But the current excitement and creativity is centered on social media advertising, and Google is not a player in that game (yet). So, search is only one part of the ad market.
More importantly, AdSense clicks are converted differently than clicks on Google's search page. Getting people to talk about this on the record is hard. Off the record, many advertisers/marketers and ad agencies will tell you that those conversions are not the same.
Conversions matter. Clicks are only the first step in the process of earning revenue. Conversions, either directly into revenue or into something deeper in the conversion funnel, such as a free trial, are what advertisers care about.
Logically, an AdSense click wouldn't convert as well as a click on Google's search page. That ingredient of direct intention on the part of the user is missing. Some advertisers may not be savvy about tracking conversions and will therefore pay the same for both types of clicks. But Google can hardly rely on dumb advertisers for its growth strategy.
Advertisers will pay less for AdSense clicks, then. This could cause AdSense revenue to decline (more on that later). Or instead, Google might "dial back" the percentage it pays out to publishers, which would almost certainly spur the system's decline in a vicious cycle. Smart publisher and smart advertisers would desert AdSense, leaving Google to profit by mediating between dumb publishers and dumb advertisers. Not a good long-term strategy.
And then there is the "brand safety" issue. The keyword approach to contextual relevance can create those ugly mismatches that you occasionally see. You know, like when you see an ad for kitchen knives while reading an article about a vicious stabbing? Readers are only faintly upset or annoyed by it when they notice it, but advertisers consider it a major issue. This is the kind of thing that keeps brand-builders up at night.
Weaker conversions and brand safety issues in search-based advertising will only fuel the excitement and creativity in social media advertising. Is AdSense simply a bottom-fishing volume game?
Why is it hard to get advertisers and their agencies to talk about this on the record? Martin Sorrel, founder and CEO of WPP (the world's largest advertising agency) speaks of Google as a "frenemy." Actually, now he has renamed it a "froe." WPP buys $850 million worth of ads per year from Google, which would normally give WPP a lot of clout with media firms. Yet Google also disintermediates ad agencies. One just buys AdWords ads directly from Google.
The relationship between advertisers and Google is delicate, one that would not be helped by advertisers speaking to journalists on the record about weaknesses in one part of Google's services. Advertisers with clout prefer to negotiate behind closed doors.
Users
The most important person in the AdSense eco-system is the user. As long as the user is clicking and buying, all is well. Publishers and advertisers will both be happy. Users may be buying less now, but that is a simple cyclical issue: we are in a consumer recession. When the economy recovers, AdSense will recover.
Well, maybe. There are three reasons to doubt this:
- Ad blindness. Advertisers are in an arms race for attention, leading them to produce ever more creative ads, in turn leading users to tune out those bland, familiar old AdSense ads all the more.
- Social media alternatives. People trust other people more than they trust ads. That is why Ad-land is channeling its creativity into inserting its brands into their conversations.
- Declining relevance. Users who do not get what they want from clicks will stop clicking. If they don't see AdSense ads on high-quality websites, and if the ads they do see are not relevant to what they are thinking about at the time, they won't click.
Google's Investors
Let's jump to Google's Q1 2009 results. The headline was that Google's revenue grew 6% (compared to the same quarter a year prior) to $5.51 billion. We can break that down as follows:
- Revenue from Google websites grew by 9% to $3.70 billion,
- Revenue from Google's partner sites, also known as network revenue or AdSense revenue, fell 3% to $1.64 billion.
According to the numbers, not all is well with AdSense. Still, a 3% decline does not sound like much; it would raise questions only with a fast-track company such as Google. Maybe this is simply the effect of the recession.
But maybe it is an early sign of a fundamental weakness in AdSense. With AdSense making up about 30% of Google's revenue, such a sign is big enough to matter. This should be a serious concern for investors. If I owned Google stock, I would be looking very hard at network revenues in Q2. Network effects can lead to explosive, hockey-stick-like growth on the way up... and falling-off-a-cliff declines on the way down. When all three constituents (publishers, advertisers, and users) were getting great value from AdSense, revenue exploded. If all three suddenly lost interest, that virtuous cycle of growth could turn into a vicious cycle of decline.
Judging from its actions, Google management fully understands the issue. Follow the money. Look at what Google is acquiring. Its two biggest acquisitions have been:
- DoubleClick, which it purchased for $3.1 billion, allowing Google to diversify from search-based advertising, so that it could have more clout with advertisers;
- YouTube, which it purchased for $1.65 billion, allowing it to lock up the fastest-growing inventory, video.
Look at the websites and services Google invests in. It plays to control inventory so that it doesn't have to depend on publishers, and so that it has better control over relevancy matching. Some of this has gotten a few publishers riled enough for them to go on record, particularly when their services lie directly in Google's path.
So, don't feel sorry for Google. It's taking care of the AdSense problem. We'll have to see, though, whether investors buy that story. Investor reaction to Google's Q2 report will be interesting.
Opportunities For Entrepreneurs, New Venture Intermediaries
If AdSense is in decline, that leaves open a big market for entrepreneurs. Publishing is not a winner-take-all market. Google will not control all online inventory. Advertisers and their agencies like choice. And users click on whatever is relevant.
We see two plays in this environment:
- Match relevance. Match relevance means parsing content to deliver more relevant ads. This is easy to say and hard to do. A lot of smart semantic tech ventures are focusing on this problem. This is smarter use of search technology than Quixotic tilting at Google's search bar dominance.
- Connecting CPM to CPA. This is another hard problem to solve but promises a huge payoff for the winner. Publishers like selling CPM (cost per mille): it is easy for them, and the burden of performing lies with the advertiser. Advertisers, on the other hand, like CPA (cost per action or acquisition): it is easy for them, and the burden of performing lies with the publisher. Both parties look at the CPC (cost per click), because that is trackable from both sides of the transaction. But CPC is just a proxy for what each really wants: CPM and CPA, respectively. Any venture that brings publishers and advertisers together with a deal that satisfies the needs of both will do very well. There is a huge opportunity here. High-quality websites that really engage with their audience will certainly do well by CPA metrics, but the solution will have to be really easy to implement.
What Do You See?
Please give us your feedback. And if possible, tell us your vantage point: publisher, advertiser or new venture intermediary.
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I don't remember the last time I clicked on an AdSense ad.
Posted by: Sanat Gersappa
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June 20, 2009 10:17 AM
Thanks for the great analysis. I have a few questions. How much of the marginal decline or fall in growth because of the economy? And are there any good alternatives for the long tail? Google has proven to be nimble over the years. I'm sure it will correct course.
excellent analysis. Agree!
You lost me with this:
the company's apps business is putting a serious dent in Microsoft's franchise
Dude, seriously, Open Office probably has 99x the install base of google apps and it doesn't even appear on the competitive radar at MS except a few times a year.
-OT
This is great story Below are a list of the top 20 reasons that you should advertise online utilizing the many different methods that are available. Because Internet advertising and marketing is so flexible it is advisable that you always know exactly what you are doing and how your advertising is being displayed to your potential customers.
http://www.emilcohen.com
By Far - one of the best teardowns of the Adwords/Adsense empire yet!
For myself, I want more transparency on the revenue split. On one of my moderate volume sites (+25k pageviews/day) I noticed a friend advertising his local business, within the same vertical.
His (Advertiser) CPC floats around $5.20/click on very specific campaigns.
My (Publisher) EPC varies widely, but its rarely 25% of what he is paying!
I have experimented with other offers, yet very few can match the "click = conversion" from a publisher perspective, when it comes to adsense. I do not have to rely on the advertisers copy converting the visitor... which makes adsense a great choice for "Set it and forget it" revenue models.
But remember, that if I am selling college lamps, and an ad at the bottom of my page is also selling college lamps, we are now in competition for one another...so, with that said, its not necessarily a bad thing, but as a publisher, I just have to make sure that I am not losing too much traffic...
College Lamp Lover Chris
I'm working on a business proposal that answers your direct question. How to turn CPM into CPA and do it socially.
I've come up with a way to integrate the model into social networks and it's based on CPA so is completely measurable.
It has the same elements as AdSense, it adds value for viewers and is relevant, only more so.
If you're interested in knowing more, or would like to help work on it with me, contact me.
AdSense is on the way out. So are old school style flashy banners. Internet savvy people won't click on them. The last time I clicked on an ad was on the NYT website - an ad from IBM that caught my eye because of its presentation.
What this means is that the cheap advertisers who copy-pasted ads will have to go out. You'll have to be good with your ad copy and presentation.
The proportion of new users on the internet is declining (particularly in the developed world) every year until we'll reach a point where almost all of the developed world's population will be categorized as "internet savvy". In that environment, Adsense can't survive. And this will happen within the next 5 years.
If I was a Google investor, I'd take my money about within the next 6 months. Google has based itself on a monopoly - the way they terminate Adsense accounts is completely dictatorial. Their refusal to show the % of profits the publishers get is criminal too..
I must agree with the previous person. The times I click on Ads it was a mistake. And for even smaller people out there (like me), we are stuck with Ad Sense until we can at least get that $100.00, until then we are stuck with Ad Sense. It will be great to see how they will innovate online advertisement to make it attractive again and maybe users will start clicking on them again.
In a nice world...people would click on other peoples Ads as a gesture of "I like your site and I will support it" but that is almost impossible to happen.
Yasser
Google is about to experiment with commission-based "product ads": http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/06/19/google-to-test-new-product-ads-on-prize-real-estate/
This may be the right answer in a web world dominated by social media. Imagine if you could get Google's help in selling that dresser that you posted a while back on Craigslist that noone bought. With Google's vast advertising network, you could agree to pay Google a cut of the sale if they helped you find a buyer.
They are only testing it now with business users but I would imagine that this kind of advertising could do just as well within social media.
Publishers are right to demand to be paid CPM. No other medium is held accountable for how well the ad works. Crappy creative can't be controlled by publisher, only the content surrounding the ad.
As far as "never clicking" on (insert name of IAB format here), then why can I make $300-$600 month via AdSense? Best month ever was post on Sarah Palin's eyeglasses: $2000 that month.
Pretty simple: people wanted Sarah Palin eyeglasses and when they saw the ad they clicked.
I used to have several adsense sites that did great, but now I think people are just becoming blind to them. You have to drive so much more traffic to gt clicks and even from the PPC side, some ads for content are getting way to expensive.
College Athletic Scholarships
After thousands of hits on my blogs and web page in 3 month's It say's I made 57 cents all together so I just quit posting movies,documentary's and new's and it was like xmen the day it came out in theaters so my web sites did not just have copy and paste goggle videos or news articles
Great write up that challenges some major conventional wisdom on AdSens that has been so dominant for the past few years.
Great analysis! Google Adsense is definitely the best advertising platform and also the best way to earn money online. All we have to do is to work well and study the different aspects affecting your Google Adsense account performance.
Adsense will remain there no matter what any one would say as currently there is no alternative to it, yes conversion varies from site to site and not adsense has to be blamed for it.
Thanks Bernard for these truly profound thoughts.
Social advertising might be the direction that should be kept in focus now.
Nevertheless, don't think Google will just do nothing about that. Changes will come with time.
Welcome to the dark side of Google, the one that is conspiciously missing from the otherwise brilliant book "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis. In fact this post really belongs in that book as a separate chapter.
For several months now, the AdSense revenue has declined for as much as 50% for my site.
First, I thought it'd be due to recession - but the fact that the competition on AdWords hasn't declined much led me to believe that somewhere Google is taking off a cut which it doesn't truly deserve! And because no one really knows what percentage they're getting from Google they can't really tell - one way of finding was that Google's revenue actually increased by 6% from the Q1 last year whereas the decline in earnings from content network is a measly 3% which constitutes about 1% of total earnings.
Google should remember that some publishers depend for their bread on Google and it is high time that Google took them for granted.
The first chance I get to replace AdSense profitably I will - its just a matter of time before everyone does!
Fees do not pay great. Click fraud is more than the site did you also have the ban.
Excellent analysis. A white labeled adsense-like solution for Publishers is wanted by the latters. Publishers sets their pricing (CPM, CPC, $), ad format and the advertisers contact details are theirs.
In Web 2.0, whatever that means these days, control/trust is the basic issue. Not Ad blindness, alternative soclai networks (Please, name one that ever promises to pay it own way without online advertising), or even content relevance.
The occasional relevant transgression of control can be, and often is forgiven online. Yet, on the whole, the savviest of users (hence, a standard all less experienced users will inevitably and always gravitate toward) have told AdNetworks who cared to inquire either directly or indirectly via the analysis of sequential transactions how little they are trusted.
Web archtecture that enables messages to get to users more seamlessly than it allows users to get done what it is they use the WWW to accomplish in their lives is slated to fail.
And I can't think of anything that fits the ends of huge distributions of "relevance" than a keyword approach.
It works often enough to make it seem "profitable" yet is unsustainable due only to the entire gambit's economic foundation in the limited lexical imaginations of the keyword buyers relative to their collectives of "topically indistinguishable" content offerings.
When visit-context is finally seen as a wholly different causal dimension to web-behavior than visitor-context, then "the next big thing" will have its first real chance at becoming real.
Think of it like this; if any content purveyor could puchase reasons for your next web-visit before you arrived, don't you think they would do so? In a heartbeat? No retailer in the world avoids this notion ("Why are you in my store?") for long. So, how in the world could not knowing these same sorts of things about web-visitors result in even higher expectations by online content providers regarding user insight?
Is it pure faith in technology over time-proven truisms about how human beings consume information? Or just the same old crass lure of the "unknown" as the chief motivation behind mainstream entrepreneurism?
TV
So if adsense is falling, what's the competition?
A Clean Life
to all those people saying they have never clicked on adsense ads: that might be true but I can tell you, others do. I have several small websites (a few thousand visitors a month) and since years click rates are stable between 0.5 and 2%, depending on the website. what changes (in a negative way) are revenues, which indicates that either google is keeping more for themselve or the publishers are paying less to Google. Anyway: i don't know any serious alternative to google adsense for webmasters of rather small websites. do you? (besides: revenues are still much higher than in pre-adsense times)
Ironic that I read this post after I read how a guy doubled his Adsense revenue from about $150 per day to almost $300 daily by changing up his Adsense ads:
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/06/20/simple-changes-doubled-my-adsense-revenue/
Yeah, it would kind of suck if Google's only giving us publishers only 25% or so of the revenue we generate, but I was a happy camper to log into my Adsense account the day after my Oprah/KFC post got a gazillion hits and I gasped and thanked God at making over $300 in one day of Adsense monies for mostly that post. (Don't know what Kontera and Amazon Associates brought in that day.)
Anyway, that guy who sued Google actually ended up losing because Google appealed -- saying it was his "pick a link" terminology that got him kicked out. But I'm for him, Google shouldn't have kicked him out like that.
But I'm still glad Google Adsense helps pay my bills...
Life gets better. Things grow and change. I'm increasing my revenue streams in a variety of ways, and am glad that Google Adsense is still flowing the dough to me.
The main question still is not answered that how much Google keep itself from the earnings of the publishers and one point to be noted is that there is not adsense support for publishers which is a great drawback.
I wonder if AdBlockPlus might not have something to do with it?
Firefox marketshare is on the rise, as is the number of users running ABP. And for every savvy user that switches to Firefox (and might have clicked on a well-matched Adsense ad), ABP switches off that revenue stream.
True, that probably won't account for a 3% decline in AdSense earnings world wide, but isn't it mostly the power users that drive the online economy? And don't those power users use browsers like Firefox?
The long tail, sadly, is made up of naive surfers who still go for 419 scams, flashing lime green YOU WON banners, and Get Rich Quick With Adsense programs. And if they don't really explore outside their little corner of the 'net, you can be sure that, eventually, every ad that Adsense could possibly serve to them, has been served.
~ Wogan
Who of all the readers of ReadWriteWeb ever click on AdSense links?
Internet Savvy people do not belong to the "Natural Born Clickers", which is a species that will get extinct as all will become educated on using the Internet.
http://bit.ly/qGSs5
This trend will kill Google slowly.
Having earned the princely sum of $160 for 400,000 off the day job at www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity in the summer of 2007, we went away and built our own hyper-local/hyper-niche ad system... www.addiply.com
Open, transparent and with a 90% revenue return for the publisher, it trialled out of the Univ of California at Berkeley late last month in its $ version...
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=291
Just one of Mr Shirky's little experiments, etc
All the best,
R
Adsense works well when it's properly targeted by the publisher, to the type of traffic that it appeals to. There is different kinds of traffic, and one particular type that adsense works well with. 1. Regular readers: they are your loyal faithful readers that visit your site often. They are familiar with its layout and style. They are blind to adsense and will usually not click those ads. Google knows this and this wasn't the type of traffic that they designed adsense to appeal to. 2. Social networking traffic: These are people coming from sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Friendfeed, Twitter, etc. They rarely click on ads of any type, you waste your time trying to find any kind of advertising that will appeal to them. Google knows this and this wasn't the type of traffic that they designed adsense to appeal to. In fact, this traffic can get your adsense account revoked if it is especially heavy, as Google sometimes looks at it as "artificially inflating page impressions". 3. Info seekers: These are people coming from search...
Great post, and highly analytical. It's been months since I saw an ad-sense ad, ad-block in firefox keeps them away!
Just so you know, emil cohen is a splogger that republished your article, completely uncredited, here: http://www.emilcohen.com/2009/06/adsense-weak-elephant-in-room.html He steals your work and then drops his little turd links in your comments.
Posted by: April Russo
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June 22, 2009 3:52 AM
You make good points about AdSense For Content that I wish you would have expanded on by specifically mentioning some of the alternatives. On my sites, AdSense is the advertiser of last resort because the financials are a black hole. In the content area, Google acts as if they are still the only game in town, but they're not. ADSDAQ, Direct Media, AdBrite (which is faltering) and new players like Underdog all actually give publishers information and control, unlike Google. Whether it's setting a CPM floor, being able to approve of reject specific creative or just knowing more about the advertisers, they all serve the publishers' interests better. AdSense has become my remnant advertising because of all that.
But I should also point out that you're over-simplifying your analysis of Google-site revenue vs. partner revenue in their financials. A big part - probably the biggest - of that dynamic is Google taking search share and dollars from its big AdSense for Search partners (ISPs and the like). Go back through Google's 10Qs and you'll see that early on the partner sites were a big percentage of their revenue and that this has shrunk over time. And you'll see the growth rate being slower for partner sites than Google sites because of that. With the bad economy, the partner numbers turn negative.
Great article and thoughtful comments. Especially liked #9 and #24. Check out the comments here and then check out the future of search at http://inversearch.blogspot.com.
Hi Richard - why would AdSense be the "weak elephant" in the room - I would think it could be a way up for electronic media?
Posted by: Terri McCormick
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June 22, 2009 6:28 AM
Subliminal messaging has its merit - look at television ads - with redundancy they can be effective even when we don't particularly want them to be.
Posted by: Terri McCormick
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June 22, 2009 6:29 AM
Why not use AdSense to show me who might be interested in advertising on my website and then contact them directly to offer a better deal?
Some really great, well informed comments here. Thanks everybody. This is "iterative journalism" at its best.
April (# 33) thanks for pointing out Emil Cohen Splogger. He will live in infamy. Google "Emil Cohen Splogger" and you will see what I mean!
Bernard
i have pressed check for update and it says 2.2.1 is the up to date :( im in UK
Bernard,
Google don't have to change their rev share to individual partners for the overall percentage to change. A 'mix effect' will do it instead.
Here is an exaple:
Qtr 1: 50% of Google's adsense revenue comes from smaller partners on (say) 60% rev share and 50% of revenue from larger partners who have negotiated a rev share of (say) 70%. Overall rev share = 65%
Qtr 2: 60% of revenue from smaller partners still on 60% rev share and 40% rev from larger partners still on 70%. Overall rev share = 64%
But you imply that google are squeezing an extra 1% from publishers. This could be true, but there is no way you can know whether it is this or whether it is the mix effect.
Hope you find this a helpful clarification and can avoid this mistake in the future (if it any consolation, I have observed a similar mistake made by other web observers)
Warm regards,
Bryan
Why you mix Branding with clicks?
That kills your analysis.
:(
As an advertiser, I've seen better or at least more cost effective conversion rates from AdSense at cheaper rates than Google Search.
I think this is due in part to PPC search managers / agencies being overly aggressive about "owning" their niche search terms and neglecting the content network.
I dunno. Maybe I'm strange, but most of my sites make 5-10 the eCPM with AdSense than the industry reports claim the average site makes (with all kinds of advertising.) My ad placement isn't particularly obnoxious or intrusive.
I hear from other ad networks all the time. They call me up, they all say they can do better than adsense. They can't. Most of them have trouble finding ads to fit my inventory. Most of them want to fill my site up with scam "flat tummy" ads that discredit my site, discredit the internet as a whole, and cause "click blindness."
I'm sticking with Adsense until something really better comes along.
Do I have a secret? Yes. Am I telling you? No.
AdSense pays only pennies. And you know
that advertising alone won't generate enough of a revenue
stream. What is needed is a tool, module, container that
enables content providers to earn a living wage. Now here's the
beauty part: we don't have to figure out which online
revenue model is best; we can leverage the web TO LET
THE AUDIENCE TELL US! A user-centric model that lets the
readers choose HOW (but not Whether or What) to pay for
content, will leave no money on the table. That's the model
behind http://www.PayCheckr.com.
I am an adsense publisher and I have to agree. My site just increase traffic by about 50% but my adsense income remained constant. What gives???
Based on my calculations, the average payout for me is only about 15% but it is a black hole. I get info on how much the top advertiser is paying per click and guesstimate how much an average advertiser pays google. So for example, the most expensive click is $1 then it's a good guess that the average advertiser pays 50 cents per click. If I am making 8 cents per click, then it is only 16%
I'm not too happy that I get such a small cut, but no other network can match the revenue I get from adsense. So Google is my friend.
i'm new to blogging and i use adsense on my blog. though the article is informative it also leaves me scratching my head. keep in mind i'm a newbie in this adsense game so it is challenging to articulate my frustrations.
i have been reading about the reasons why site visitors don't click on google ads the top reasons being people tune the ads out because they are annoyed by them. there was once a time i did not click google ads not because i was annoyed by them but because i knew nothing of adsense in relation to the publisher. in my ignorance i believed that google was the only recipient of revenue so i didn't click because i figured google had enough money as it was.
now that i am a part of adsense as a publisher, i don't hesitate to click an ad because regardless of the percentage the publisher gets he/she is in need of that revenue. i am very annoyed by animated pop-up ads that some sites implement that also block the content i want to read. sometimes one click of the X to close the box doesn't get rid of it. it keeps coming back.
so when i read this article, do you mean to say that people actually find these pop-up, animated ads appealing and are more willing to click on them than non-intrusive ads like google's banners? apparently others don't share my sensibilities when i'm on a website because i do not click on intrusive ads. to me that reduces the overall experience of the website because before i even get a chance to read the content i'm accosted with a floating ad. it just seems ridiculously backwards to me.
are site visitors so self-absorbed that they will only click an ads that interests them as opposed to clicking an ad that interests them as well as click an ad as a token of appreciation for the work and effort put into content and the look of the site. I have put a lot of forethought and time into my site, and to be very frank i NEED the revenue. i will stick with adsense for the time being but sometimes my overall frustration with doing this is trying to predict what people will do, or not do.
I guess i'm naive, but it is amazing how visitors withhold something that doesn't require anything of them (at least not on my blog). the least that someone can do (a simple click) and they won't even do it. it is very discouraging. i've only been blogging for five months and sometimes i feel like a street performer. i put all this effort into what i'm doing, yet there's just a couple of pennies in my hat. i enjoy what i'm doing but let's face it i'm not doing it for just a pat on the back and some kind words.
Great analysis. I have consistently increased my traffic, and found the revenue remaining level. It is disappointing, but as others have said, Adsense is the best ad network out there. There is no real alternative at this point.
In response to Carter (above). To ask people to arbitrarilly click ads on websites, just because they like the site or article, is basically stealing money from an advertiser and putting it in the publisher's pocket and giving the ad network a cut. Effectively, this raises the cost of advertising for the sellers of products and services, a cost they will have to pass on to their consumers.
If your article or site is good enough, it will attract high quality readers and high quality advertisers, and matching them will be where the honest money is at.
In response to McGelligot:
I said I was new to the Adsense game, not an idiot. I never stated anywhere in my comment that I was asking site visitors to click on the ads on my site (nor do I think this was implied).
My comments were in reference to what I have been reading (not just in this article, but others) concerning the reasons why site visitors do not click on ads. What I have read is that one of the top reasons for this is that visitors are annoyed by ads. Another reason given is that visitors will click on ads that ONLY interest them.
I was questioning why visitors did not also click ads to show a token of appreciation for the effort and time put into a web owner's site; I was not saying I was asking visitors (or had asked my visitors) to click on my ads to show appreciation. I just want to make that clear.
i'm using adsense for a health portal called goodhealthnyou.com i also started using widget to for in line advertisement is that good for the site