No sense in AdSense

Originally when I start this site, I thought “I could make money from AdSense like I see on every other site on the planet”. This turned out to be wrong in many and varied ways.

For starters, AdSense is great if you have a busy site with thousands of visitors an hour. Then it would make sense. But for smaller sites (and I mean much smaller) it just isn’t really a big earner and often it doesn’t do anything except take up screen real-estate. And, I feel compelled to point out, that the people who have 2 AdSense blocks on their sites side bars, a header and footer block of ads, and ads within every freaking post, are not going to be making any more money than if you had one ad block on a page. I don’t think Google will count the impressions from the 4-6 ad blocks on a page so you are left only with click thru’s which are becoming more rare. And I believe, as most people are turned off by an ad overloaded site, that site owners will be waiting quite a while to get the minimum cash out amount ($100) from Google.

There are, of course, exceptions. A niche site for example that has a lot of back links and content to offer will probably do well with an ad block or a random ad somewhere in a post or page. However this also, once again, proves the rule that content is king. So most exceptions aren’t truly exceptions as they just follow the standard good practices of writing which is, basically, write well and write often.

So, for all of you with sites that have 100 ads on it, take away all but one ad block and see what you are left with. This is what Google is actually looking at and what your visitors would like to see. If you don’t like what you see build up more and better content. And for those that say “You’re crazy! I’ve made oodles from AdSense”, please comment and post your site and let us know how you did it whether it be one busy site or 50 kinda-busy sites. Or if you bribed Google. If you did that (and it worked) please post the name and address of whom to send it too.

- Cheers

4 Responses to “No sense in AdSense”

  1. Haunted TUNA Says:

    Hey, I clicked on your blog from a blog forum and i thought i read that u do have ads on ur site? But i dont see any.
    It didnt go good at all?

  2. Paul G Says:

    For the amount of space it took up, I really wasn’t worth the 3 cents a day. When I get some more sites going perhaps Ill re-institute it but for now its not worth it.

    How is adsense going for you Tuna?

  3. Nsane Noob Says:

    Paul, I agree with you but no 100%. I have ads on my blog and I don’t really think that they are that annoying. It’s true that I am not making a lot of money but I’m making more then 3 cents a day. For example, today I made $1.50 and the day has not ended. Thing is, I try to get my Google pagerank really high and the higher , the more visitors. The more visitors, the higher the chance someone will click.

  4. Paul G Says:

    NSane,
    Not all ad block are annoying. I am totally fine with the header ad block on NSaneblog. That is perfectly fine. I find only slightly annoying are the random inter-content ads on the top or bottom of a post. This is not as huge a thing as I usually make it since it is only about every 3 or 4 posts that a content ad is put it. In my opinion you did it pretty well (obviously, since I visit you blog and comment semi-sorta-regularly).