Scrivs recently asserted that Adsense is a beginner’s first option, but a professional’s last. I found his analysis to be overly simplistic (he later admitted that there are exceptions to this).

The question I’m interested in, is when is Adsense likely to be a site’s primary monetization vehicle? And when is the right time to “go direct” with your ad sales?

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Getting your AdSense account suspended is not the end of the world but it’s obviously something to avoid if you can. So it was while I reviewed the AdSense Terms and Conditions of Use that I thought it might be worth highlighting some key areas to watch out for. Under no circumstances should this replace your reading the small print thoroughly yourself, which you can do at Google, but this summary may serve as a timely reminder of your key responsibilities:

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Google have announced a new scheme where your Adsense blocks now can invite advertisers to sign up and advertise on your site. What does this mean to you us as publishers?

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I was giving a little thought to Philipp's credibility and affiliate links post today, and it struck me, not for the first time, how ludicrous some of the arguments for disclosing affiliate links in blogs are. At the extrememe end of the disclosure argument you have those that think every affiliate link should be followed by (aff link) in the post, to let people know. But, many of these people show Adsense right? Can you see where im going with this?

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One of the things I didn't want to do with Performancing was blog every single piece of information that might possibly be of interest, but generally write and encourage you to write more original, useful posts. But we all like to have something good to read with our morning coffee right? So, please welcome the start of a new, occasional series called Elevenses, where i'll post a few notable stories for your mid-morning reading. Enjoy...

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Most professional bloggers use the excellent combination of Google AdSense for revenue and FeedBurner's feed publishing service for syndication and promotion. However, I have seen that not too many bloggers are aware of Google Adsense sister-program, AdSense for feeds. Essentially AdSense for feeds ties into your AdSense account and allows you to display advertisements of your choosing within your feed given Google's AdSense for Feeds code.

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Unit size is an important consideration when starting out on your experimentation with an Ad Program. Large and prominent would be the obvious way to go but as mentioned in my previous Ad Formatting post (of which this is an extension), subtlety can be more productive.

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Can the source of your traffic affect AdSense revenues? Jeremy Zawodny thinks so in an interesting piece of subjective research he muses:

Digging a bit deeper, it's interesting to look at the click through rate (CTR) for various sources. Here's where the numbers get interesting. It seems that AOL and MSN users are more likely to click. Ask.com users aren't far behind. Yahoo is in third place with Google trailing by a fair amount.

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The release of a referral program for AdSense is a pretty innocuous event on the face of it. But delve a little deeper and you start to understand why Google are dipping their toes into affiliate marketing.

Take a look at Google AdSense revenue growth over the last three quarters and you see incremental decreases of 19%, 8% and 7%. Why? Well one possibility is that we're witnessing the classic signs of a maturing market, but that's a little incongruous with some of the fastest growth in the blogosphere on record.

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The Adsense team have posted a case study of Jason Calanis' Weblogs Inc. You may recall that WIN was sold to AOL. The study looks at how WIN used channels and link units to take their blogs from $300 a day to $3000 a day. Nice work Jason and the team!