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Adsense not working

I have just removed Adsense from my left sidebar because the performance has been truly awful.  I installed it after a commenter came on pretty heavy with some bullish forecasts of how much money I was leaving on the table, and so I thought I should try it (as a reminder all money generated by this blog goes to charity).

The result – sub $10 in revenue over three and a half months.

The reason – nobody clicks through.

The explanation – people visit the EquityKicker to read and comment, I bet most of them don’t even notice the ad is there.

June 12th, 2009 | Category: Advertising, Business models
  • I think that Adsense only really makes sense for consumer-led websites that have huge volumes of traffic. On Gamesbrief, I find that I get the same ads for Freemium games all the time: my audience comes back regularly, and having not clicked on an ad once, they won't click on it the third or tenth time.

    Having said that, I've made more on clickthroughs than you have (but not a huge amount more), which is probably because Gamesbrief crosses over into the "serious gamer reader" as well as professionals.

    My conclusion: blogs rarely make money from display advertising alone, and since AdSense in lowest common denominator, it's tough to generate premium CPMs with it. Therefore, a blog needs to make money from other areas: for me Gamesbrief is predominantly about generating consultancy business and I am also working on a guide called "Self-Publishing for Developers" which I will sell directly from the site.
  • Hi Nicholas - I agree, as Rangaswami would put it we make money because of our blogs, not with them
  • Paul Bowen
    Hi Nic - what was your "eCPM"? I'd be interested to know because given your content the clicks from adsense should have been highly valued..
  • $0.35 - hope yours is better....
  • David C
    I didn't notice the adverts because I read this and other blogs in Sage, an RSS reader for Firefox. Doesn't(nearly) everyone use an RSS reader? Don't all RSS readers strip out the adverts? (Had to click through to the web site to post this.)
  • That's a good pint David. You can put ads in the feed but I haven't wanted to do that. To be fair the suggestions for making good money from Adsense required putting the ads directly in the post, which would have shown up in the feed and hence been seen by many more people.
  • Here is a link to the original post
    http://www.theequitykicker.com/2009/02/11/whats...

    It is possible to achieve eCPMs $30+ with Adsense, though then you are really designing your site to make an Adsense click your primary goal.

    That being said, I did suggest in the comments a primary goal should be subscribers rather than immediate revenue. Email plus potentially RSS subscribers are "potential monetization" in that you are then in a position to monetize them effectively, and repeatedly, or could also be looked on as "latent monetization" because you have expended energy in the conversion process and can release that energy at a later date.
  • try putting it below the article, a content ad, above the stars. You will be suprised the difference placement makes. But it might move it to a EUR but as this is not a site geared for AdSense you will not be getting $30 of course, but very few people do.
  • It may you are not focusing on Adsense itself ,my advise it to set google ads the recommended way,you will not lose more if you use in the 10% or 20% space ,over the page.
  • i agree with you i don't use it anymore either
  • Thanks for your blog ! you’re right! It's not easier.
  • I think you should try to use another one, other than adsense.
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