Comments on: The Great Adsense Hypocrisy Part 2

By: Chris Garrett

Chris Garrett — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 01:59:28 +0000

That would work chello, but only once you have used adsense or an alternative to work out what works and what doesnt and which advertisers would be interested in your content?

By: chello

chello — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 15:48:17 +0000

This post made me think about my old days working in television, there were two types of animals in that jungle; the purist who was in TV to make great pictures and build a life in the industry vs the salesperson moneymaker who saw a chance to make gazillions. The purist was about art and the moneymaker was about filling 30 second holes in the air to make lots of money. One saw the other’s work as a “neccessary evil”.
So the use of ads on your site or blog is simply a matter of perspective. If you are motivated to purely make cash, you will look for the sucker traffic at the expense of depth. If you are into the spirit and art only, you will make something cool but will probably go broke.
If you are making a site to get a message out there and need to make money, balance is the key.
If you are just out to suck visitors in and use the web community to get rich a few cents at a time, you won’t loose a minute’s sleep or even be reading this blog!
My advice . . . put the ads on, put in heaps! But remember the pure reason you sweated over the content, that’s why the people are on your site. If you make a fortune from that, you will be truly fulfilled.
Won’t you?

I whack a heap of advertising on the BuderimCommunity site but maintain value in the content so I can sleep at night .
Cheers
chello

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 19:59:19 +0000

I have to admit that I am one of those people who came in here and believed this place was “advice for spam blogs” BUT this is an enlightened useful post indeed.

Chris – I used to have adsense all over my blogs and now I have minimized it to just 4 text links that I force myself to forget about.

Anyhow, in forcing myself to not think about income I notice my hollow dead zone blogs are coming alive again and my creativity is growing. Today I do not blog for money, that will come later. What I blog for is to learn what fuels the machine (search engines). Though I may be blogging about environmental stuff and hobby stuff this is my education, a self education, and it is fun.

The idea of thousands of paid writers blogging for dollars by loading the engines with content still makes me a bit ill. Stick with what drives your passion, you can not lose in this and the engines will surely reward you if you are patient and alert, even IF they are driven by stupid robots.

By: HomeOfficeVoice

HomeOfficeVoice — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 19:05:22 +0000

Chris … I love your style. And this is your best post to date.

Don’t readers of blogs realise …
Damn you readers, don’t hang around and waste my bandwidth – just click on the AdSense ads I’ve plastered all over the place … don’t you get it, I want your pennies

You’re starting to think adsense might be bad for bloggers – I’ve been evolving into that view for quite a while now. At last, someone with some clout and cajones says what I believe, deep down, many are starting to realize.

By: Michael Moncur

Michael Moncur — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 14:35:01 +0000

I see this as a fundamental dichotomy that applies to all sites, and I’ve observed this long before blogs, and long before AdSense:

1. 10% of your readers love your site, visit regularly, and recommend it to others. They rarely click on ads.

2. 90% of your readers arrived from a search that may only be tangentially related to your site. They aren’t likely to visit again, but they click on ads.

The percentages aren’t always the same, but I’ve seen this on every single site I run. I consider it fundamentally a good thing: the 90% are subsidizing the site for the 10%. I focus on making a great site for the 10%, and the 90% come anyway and click on ads.

Potential solutions:

1. Find a way to make money from the 10%–this is what Chris talked about above. Tip jars, memberships, selling T-shirts or merchandise. It’s not likely to make you as much money as the 90% are, but ideally it will protect you from the chaos of the ad market.

2. Change the percentages–make the 10% higher and the 90% lower. This is actually far more difficult than it sounds, but if you’ve got a site with different percentages – like 99% search traffic and 1% regulars – you need to work on getting more regulars.

3. Work on moving people from the 90% into the 10%. This means making every page a good introduction to your site, and including some sticky links (related articles, most popular articles, etc.) to get people interested. I’ve found this doesn’t change the percentages – as more people join the 10%, you get more search traffic in the 90%. But I see that as a good thing.

I see this 90/10 split as unavoidable with nearly every site, whether you use advertising or not–it’s a fact of the search engine economy. If you acknowledge this and work with it, you can succeed.

Also: if you created the site to make money, or if you’re writing to make money, you’re doomed. Find a topic you actually LIKE writing about, and develop a community (that 10%) you ENJOY writing to and working with, and you’ll do much better in the long term.