Having my Google Adsense income drop this year by 75% sometime in June and not recovering in the last 6 months, I have to wonder if Google Adsense is even worth the effort anymore.

I've put in 2 years of work to see it almost disappear.

I'm beginning to think that Adsense is now dead for me.

Am I the only one?

Jean

P.S. I've also had a client who was spending around $500 a month on Adsense and totally gave up on them due to poor response to numerous ads and then finding his ads on porn sites, also being charged for clicks when no clicks had occurred, this according to the adsense statements on their site. Coupled with a very poor response from the adwords support, he simply gave up and with my blessing. We now use other avenues to advertise.

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oh geez, my revenues bite too...but they're getting better...maybe the extra time, research and effort you put into making the sites your Adsense ads (not Adwords) are on will help increase earnings over time.

I wouldn't give up - even if you make 500 a year with Adsense on sites that you don't touch, that's still an extra 500 a year.

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Adsense = ad cents

affiliate dollars = $1,000.00s

Google has a problem doing no evil and continually degrades publisher income.

Your client cannot spend $500.00 on Adsense since Adsense if for publishers to earn money...

Your client spent $500.00 via Adwords to run ads on the Adsense network which as most marketers know is akin to shooting oneself in the foot, the quality of most Adsense websites is very poor and as such does not drive a targeted buying consumer to the advertiser.

You would probably serve your client best by finding professional marketing help.

Regards

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97% of advertising revenue goes to the top 3 or 4 sites ... the rest goes to the other million sites.

Can anyone say "subscriptions"?

Arthur

I've used Adsense for several years. My revenues dropped by about 75% this year as well. I've not "given up," but I've been looking at other avenues of residual income.
My Amazon.com reseller account went down to less than $10 per month this year, which is a huge drop. I'll probably be pulling all their ads off my sites soon.
Adwords... I don't use it. I've found that in competitive areas, the competition clicks more than potential clients. I just did a test two months ago, and spent over $200 in two weeks, without one extra real lead. I just don't use it.

On the consumer side, I completely ignore any pay per click ads unless I"m gaging them for a new campaign, and have found that my clients do the same. They know which ones are the paid ads (especially when surfing google), and reject them for "real results."

It's tough to determine where to go though. Commission Junction has always been a big waste of my time, I've never made anything worthwhile compared to the time their system takes.

I've added Kontera to some of my sites, but the results are mixed. It's easy to set their stuff up, but the revenues haven't been that great.

If you find anything that looks good out there, tell me, and I will as well...

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We still make a OK income from Adsense, but it is about 75% of what it used to me. However, we are steadily working to get away from adsesnse all together as the future is bleak. Since Google went IPO, the profits have dropped, though clicks throughs on our networks have double. Ugh.

Adwords in the content network, is valid and worth while if managed correctly. Be sure to turn on the seperate bids for the content network. It save tons of money.

I would love for Google to apply some better filters to who they allow in their AdSense network. Most sites with adsense are just pure garbage.

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Hi Jean,

Never really been fond of either of them. I Tried putting adsense on several websites we run and the pittance we got in return for the thousands of hits was just not worth the effort.

Also, tried adwords and found we'd be running at a loss very soon if we continued at the rate we were.

I hear of many success stories though, so it must work, just need to know the tricks I suppose, which I don't.

I even had a Google representative call me saying that my site, with its page rank ( and Alexa rank (7,000 at the time) , (yes he quoted Alexa rank <*shock*>) could generate over $2000 per month. Great I thought, so I put adsense on my site. Total was more like $50 for the month. The degradation of the site because of the ads just wasn't worth $40 so it was hastily removed.

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It's possible that the area you have choosen "Retirement communities is just sour right now. With the slump in real Esate market people have to sell before they buy. I have seen increases in revenue, but we still keep adding pages to sites. Different markets go through changes, some are naturally seasonal as well. Diversify by going into several markets and in the long run it pays off. Just keep marketing your sites.

Adsense has never been very profitable for us. You need a really appealing site with many visitors who understand that your site (e.g., blog) is supported by the ads - and they have to click the ads.

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Jean

as soon as i hit the payout in jan. dropping adsense and my Marlboro's. you see it on so many sites, i think some people see it as a merrygoround. and the false clicks, fom sites like www.khjdsfkjdhfbvmjbd.com sucked.

mike

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I have to put in an agree vote... This i s kinda funny I used adwords AND adsense for a time. When I stopped driving traffic to my site with adwords my adsense revenue dropped precipitously, even though adwords really wasn't bringing THAT much additional traffic into the site. That tells me that the main people who were clicking my adsense ads (giving me money) are the same ones who came into my site by clicking my adwords ad on some other side (taking my money and splitting it between google and the publisher). I ditched adwords because it was
costing more than it was bringing in in both sales and adsense. I seem to be selling about the same with or without adwords, so that tells me the adwords clickers were tire kickers. I appreciated their clicks to adsense but it was a loss when you rack it up beside adwords.

It shouldn't be an issue that most adsense sites are crap. If they are truly crap no one goes to them so no one will click your adword so you won't be out anything.

I guess the novelty wore off google ads jut like it did with banner ads in 1996. People would click google ads because they respected google and the buzz lasted for several years. But I think the surfers just have herd immunity to google ads now.

This one got me, had to reply.
Now that Google secretly scores ads and landing pages, I would suspect you are paying more for adwords and receiving less for non-cents. You see they are charging more for what is perceived as non generating clicks that are not making them money. Non-clicks upset advertisers. Yep, people want something for their money they spend on adwords not just clicks.

For instance you have a high traffic blog and your users click on ads cause they like 'em or they want to support your, submit their email address or download a virus, for your effort you may get a quarter.

In this case you will get more than cents, but if you are a lowly blogger that same ad might pay you a nickel.

At the same time they are rewarding the fat spenders with high CTR scores with lower rates and placing them higher in the GSEP (google search engine pollution) rank.

It's time to not rely on Google for anything, you must have a Backup plan.
Since Google has dicouraged buying links, you really have no other choice but to buy advertising from them if that iws what you want, but if you use your imagination a little, do some reaserch and cross the tees and dot the eyes you can thrive without Google.

My advise to anyone with a mind, there are plenty of ways to make money online, Google just made it a whole lot tougher. Get rid of that googlesyndication.com paying pennies per click and make something that attracts people to you and your products and opinion.

It pays my bills. Bye Google, nice knowin' ya before you became evil.
Dann

Likewise here, I feel your frustration. Myself and an associate have both had massive drops in adsense revenue the last few months, after previous months of steady increases beforehand. A large portion of the ads recently are irrelevant rubbish, like adsense spam, they can afford to bid high because no-one would click on them anyway. New ones come in almost as fast we can block their urls.

I'm currently considering using Commission Junction's Ebay affiliation for related auction keywords, I should search to see if anyone here has had any success with it.

I'll be watching this thread for other alternatives for two community oriented support sites that we prefer to keep subscription free.

Gotta agree with you there purplepaisley, the only problem is the tens of millions of spywareblaster users will never get to the landing page. Same goes for bfast, cj, doubleclick, clickbank and the list goes on, add to that ad-block and your audience shrinks big time.

I guess my point is you can't just slap a web page up and expect the money to come rolling in, it takes a whole lot more effort than copy/paste.

We use Adwords to generate leads, but long ago selected the option to prevent any of the ads from being served on the 'affiliate' sites. For our business we found that to be an absolute waste of money.

We DO generate lots of revenue from people buying our services when they search for them directly on Google, but never a dime from people reading blogs, etc vaguely related to our material. In fact by placing our Ads in the affiliate network we felt like we were more subject to click-fraud than we were on just the main google search site.

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No real need for yet another 'amen' to negative comments about adwords, but if each vote is counted 8=], I don't get sales for near as much as the adwords cost me and am about to quit, too.

Toni

Great post (and statistics) from ArthurNYC. I feel unless you get a ton of traffic Adsense isn't going to give you a significant income. Sure an extra $500 a month or even year is definitely welcome but you can't live off of it.

Adsense was good income 3-4 years ago but not anymore. I also feel we'll see the same deterioration of SEO in the next few years.

Tom
Bizak.com

I have to fall in line with the majority.
I have several sites that maintain a steady traffic flow and while click throughs remain fairly consistent, payments have dropped considerably.

Reg

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yes, definitely Adsense/Adwords come up with more and more crap every day. But what is the alternative? I have not found anybody who would pay me more than them as advettiser and also i do not know of anybody that delivers better traffic than them for the same cost. any suggestions are appreciated.

sesile.com

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Early 2007 I signed up with Vibrant Media (Intellitxt) and have been extremely happy with them. Your site must have high traffic to qualify, but it's worth applying to them. My Intellitxt payouts now exceed Adsense even though my Adsense impressions have skyrocketed they reduced payment - which forced me to look elsewhere for income - and I'm glad I did. Diversify!

Here's the Vibrant Media application process (text copied from their website).

How do I Join?

To join the program and get your Referral Awards simply send an email with Vibrant Ads Referral as the subject line to bdusa@vibrantmedia.com if in the US or bduk@vibrantmedia.com outside the US.

Please include the following information:

The name of the site(s) you wish to refer
The contact details of the person we should get in touch with
Your site(s) name
Your contact details
In addition, let us know if we can share your name along with your success using Vibrant Ads!

--------

Another new program is ADSDAQ ADSDAQ - A New Advertising Exchange from ContextWeb
They don't have a referral program yet so this referral to you is my treat!
I signed up at the end of November and so far they have easily made up the difference of income that I have lost from falling Adsense funds.


Hope this helps someone

Adword is dead for me, it doesn't convert for me at all.

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I took all Google ads down on the majority of sites,
there are still a couple I haven't gotten to yet, and replace them with affiliate links when I do,

if not I would rather have no ads than a Google ad on my sites, but there ARE plenty of alternatives

bijan814 - well here there is another. I get lots of clicks not many sales. Find out where G is placing your ads!!
That's where the quality score became relevant and landing page come into question,quality Score$%$ came into play.
Google says you get clicks and no sales because your product or landing page sucks, I say the traffic from Google SUCKS!
My conversion rate on Yahoo! is incredible MSN not that bad 30% possibly, Google? I forget the last conversion.

Google has less advertisers willing to pay ludicrous fees and many more have figured out their content networks are horses crap to put in nicely have gone away, their core financial base.
Yet they still allow arbiritidge and domains for adwords, if they are trying to fight spam they really got me baffled.
As a matter of fact they seem to be encouraging it, at the expense of the user.

Good Luck Google fan bois real soon you'll be all alone.