Why am I so against Adsense? There are a few reasons, I risk getting into a rant if I list them all!
My main reason for disliking Adsense is that it changes people. There are strong publishers who resist the siren call, but in most cases there are two outcomes with Adsense monetization:
- Defeat – The publisher feels a failure because of the measly Adsense payment, if they even get any at all
- Submission – The publisher changes their whole approach to serve the needs of the Adsense block rather than their readers
Often in a last ditch attempt the blogger or webmaster will go from (1) to (2).
What do I mean by “submission”? Well have you noticed the hoops you have to jump through to get good Adsense earnings are mostly not reader-friendly?
- Cloaking ads so they look like navigation
- Blending colors and fonts so they don’t look like ads
- Tuning content so better, higher earning ads display
- Tweaking presentation to increase click-throughs
- Attracting a higher percentage of first time visitors who are more likely to click
- Using misleading headlines to generate search traffic that leaves via ads
- etc etc
By all means make money with Adsense, just please do not get caught into the trap of subjigating your strategy to it or feeling like you are a failure if your blog does not earn the big bucks.
Personally, I go for loyal audience over adsense clicks any day 🙂
7 thoughts on “Feeding the Ad Click Machine”
It does seem to take more creativity and effort to build and monetize a loyal audience. However, the profits are well worth it because you can get much more money per visitor than through AdSense.
I blog about carbon offsetting. I think most companies are on the up and up but some are not. I block the companies that are not up and up from putting ads on my site. I have one column of adds, if people click on it that is great. I would never change my content to get better ad clicks.
I am never going to get rich like this but I hope. I appareantly am not doing to good because I have made 20.00 in 6 months.
Yes I showed some ways we can do that, eg. by age or cookie in some older articles
Personally, I think that having adsense on your blog while keeping a loyal readership is possible… The trick is to put adsense ad blocks on archived posts that are performing well search engine-wise. It works very, very well.
@Ahmed – “easily” and “slapping on” hint at the issue. It’s not easy. You can monetize a loyal audience with your own products and services as I do, or with affiliate or monthly/CPM ads. Some people manage to do well with both audience and adsense, most however do not.
@Markus – Exactly, for adsense to work it has to be the priority, whereas for a blog to work long term the audience needs to be the priority. The two do not cohabit very comfortably.
The main thing is giving ads an attractive place which makes the content less attractive. You do it or you don’t. But publishers should not whine if ads are placed badly and they don’t get CTR.
By now I am writing purely what I want to write about and add some keyword density for better search results.
Writing for AdSense is definitely driving visitors loyalty down!
you know, preaching would be more effective if you could show people how to monetize ‘loyal’ audience, preferably as easily (or at least in a hand-holding way) as slapping on and tweaking adsense.
I’m just saying…
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