Is this nice little earner gone?

TOm Kelly

This guy proclaims that adsense is no longer a viable option for webmasters:

http://homepage.eircom.net/~amaverick/index.htm

mneylon

It was covered by Eric Giguere today as well. Read his comments:
http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/The-Death-of-AdSense.html

TOm Kelly

Thanks Blacknight - hadn't seen that.

Arch-Stanton

I had a read of the document and it mentions that Goog made the changes in November 2005, however as you read down it says that it’s in effect since August 2006. (Not sure what happened to all the months in between)

Rather than the “death of Adsense” it could be called “the death of Adsense on MFA sites or spam sites”

Although one point is clear, “never have all your eggs in one basket” if adsense is a substantial part of your income and it starts to drop, well then it’s worth considering alternative PPC programmes such as Overture and/or targeted banners campaigns like you find on Commission Junction.



.

TOm Kelly

I have also been looking recently at YPN as an alternative to Adsense - on one discussion I was monitoring - a guy claimed that he was getting up to six times more on YPN than on Adsense --- others said that Adsense has better inventory of ads - others said that it depends on your site ... I guess the answer is the old marketing classic - Test! Test! Test!

democrates

TOm Kelly wrote:

I guess the answer is the old marketing classic - Test! Test! Test!

Exactly. The galactic irony of course is that you need to test because the marketing activity of these suppliers is such that you need independant emprical data to make a good purchasing decision, ie, marketers often mis-inform the market.

If you have a focussed site you might contact potential advertisers directly with good stats on your visitor rates and their area of interest. While advertisers may primarily use the established means you might provide a good alternative for them to try in their mix.

mneylon

TOm Kelly wrote:

I have also been looking recently at YPN as an alternative to Adsense

Last I head it wasn't available to Irish publishers

jmcc

blacknight wrote:

It was covered by Eric Giguere today as well. Read his comments:
http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/The-Death-of-AdSense.html

Site seems to be timing out and having problems with Tomcat. Is this guy a splogger or does he create real sites?

Regards...jmcc

the_quiet_man

How does this adsense work?
Everytime someone on your site clicks one of these advertising links you get money?
So could you not just log on yourself and start clicking on links?
Or even better write a script to do it?
Surely google have thought of this?

mneylon

If you click on your own ads or use an automated script to do it for you you will get banned. Yes - google have thought of this

TOm Kelly

Google exercises stringent controls over it's Adwords/Adsense programs -

If you ever set up an Adsense account - DON'T be tempted to click on the ads on your site to earn money for yourself ... Google tracks it and you will be banned - lots of people have suffered this fate ... some of then not realising they were doing any real harm ... I have heard of people's accounts nuked because their children / family clicked on some of their ads to 'help out' ...

In places like India, major 'click rings' were set up where people were paid hourly rates to click on ads - often wiping out entire Adwords advertisers budgets in hours - this is known as 'clickspam' - I think that certain regions are now excluded from participation in the programme now.

If you get banned by the big G ... that is it ... you do not get back in ... their Terms of Sale say that they do not even have to tell you why ... and your domain remains banned for life - which may be an issue if you ever want to sell it on.

And yes, Blacknight, you may be right there - I had read that they had not manged to roll out YPN internationally as they had not got sufficient stock of advertisers to serve up ads consistently - must be tough for them trying to keep up with Google.

Democrates, bang on that website owners should look at selling direct adverising as well - and also consider targeted affiliate programmes also ...

- on the issue of selling to adverisers - particularly in Ireland - have you a source of potential rates that may be charged depending on traffic / sector etc.? Thanks.

Arch-Stanton

TOm Kelly wrote:

- on the issue of selling to adverisers - particularly in Ireland - have you a source of potential rates that may be charged depending on traffic / sector etc.? Thanks.

That's a hard one to nail down, depending on the industry your website is targeting etc. however, a rule of thumb would be around 400 per month per 100,000 page views (actual page views, not hits).

.

regi

Our adsense revenue keeps getting better lately... strange

Gordon

Clickspammers deserve to be neutered from Google, I'm glad Google ban them for good.

Sidane

Arch-Stanton wrote:

That's a hard one to nail down, depending on the industry your website is targeting etc. however, a rule of thumb would be around 400 per month per 100,000 page views (actual page views, not hits).

.

Where'd you get that rule of thumb Arch? Seems very high.

If my site was bringing in that kind of money per 100,000 page views I'd be living on a beach earning 20%, not watching my adsense revenue crawl up dollar by dollar!

jmcc

Sidane wrote:

Where'd you get that rule of thumb Arch? Seems very high.

If my site was bringing in that kind of money per 100,000 page views I'd be living on a beach earning 20%, not watching my adsense revenue crawl up dollar by dollar!

You do realise that the figure that Arch-Stanton is quoting is $400 per 100K. You might be living on a beach but you couldn't afford the tent or food on that. But it is a good baseline.

Regards...jmcc

Sidane

jmcc wrote:

You do realise that the figure that Arch-Stanton is quoting is $400 per 100K. You might be living on a beach but you couldn't afford the tent or food on that. But it is a good baseline.

Regards...jmcc

Well my site does several million page views a month, so unless tent prices have sky-rocketed since I was a cub scout I reckon I could afford it on that kind of baseline!

I gotta get out there and get this sucker paying out properly!

vito

If it's the site in your siggy then your not going to make anything like this.

Forums are notoiously poor for clickthroughs AFAIK and advertisiers are probably not going to pay such rates to appear in forums.

Now if you extended that site to have some static high-quality themed content it might be a different ballgame altogether. Maybe even just a landing page rather than straight to the forum proper?

Oh, and if it's not that site then I'm just babbling

Arch-Stanton

Sidane wrote:

Where'd you get that rule of thumb Arch? Seems very high.

Yes, it’s actually conservative , as I said it’s a rule of thumb with regard to certain content sites. It’s depending of what keywords are targeted by advertisers, with regard to adsense some reasonably competitive keywords such as; ( diet, weight loss, cancer, health, web hosting, ) will give that return.

Keywords such as ( mortgage, loans, ringtones ) should bring a higher return.

If you move away from adsense and try private advertising and target keywords such as (casino, gambling, poker etc.) you could go higher again.

As Vito said, forums (unless they are extremely busy) with new visitors, tend not to do well in adsense, this is because forums are community based and most visits are repeat visitors from that community.

In relation the whole (website) advertising market, it changes rapidly, so a rule of thumb today may not be tomorrow.


.

Arch-Stanton

Back to the adsense report!

I read the second part of that report, I was expecting some kind of a “sell”, but there was no hard sell in the report, I thing this guy is trying to get adsense publishers to look at their ads in a different way or maybe the chap just has some kinda grudge against Google.

I am not a “marketer” however, I remember getting advice from a friend in the marketing game, and he told me to always thing of “what is the long term value of a customer”

Did any marketing gurus read the second report?

.

TOm Kelly

He is definitely posturing himself for an offer later on to the list that he is building - but in the meantime, it is a good read -

The second part focuses on 'click flipping' - a type of arbitrage between Adwords and Adsense and Affiliate Programmes etc. - I think a lot of money has been made out of this ... at the expense of ADWORD advertisers ... but Google have tightened up on it.

Reading between the lines, I expect him to eventually pitch products on List Building - Click Flipping - Selling Leads - and God knows what else ...

But, again I hand it to him - his site now shows over 29000 sign-ups in about two weeks ... How are you doing in your marketing efforts?