Changing the World, on $9 a day?

Of course around the net bloggers are slamming down their pens screaming “I knew it, this Adsense lark is a load of crap!”, but there are some pretty major reasons why Guy pocketed less than minimum hourly wage per day.

Firstly, Guys Adsense placement was both weak, and minimal. There are scores of tutorials on how to integrate Google ads into your website so that they aren’t skipped over by the usual banner blindness.

I’m not sure if they help personally, but intuitively it makes sense. People who are reading your site are most likely to read all content that looks like a part of the site, and skip over what looks like advertisements. Many decades of watching television, reading newspapers, and listening to radio have helped us refine this filter in our brain.

All that said, even with Bad ad placement and minimal adblocks, you'd imagine 6,000 page views a day would merit more than $9 a day. It has to be said, that whilst Adsense success stories are numerous, posts like Guys make you wonder how much money can be made from AdSense when you are running a technology based website, with tech-savvy visitors.

As far as demographics go, the populace of digg, reddit, slashdot, stumbleupon etc aren’t the best people to have landing on your site, in terms of clickthroughs. I would guess that many if not the majority of these people have Ad blocking software* installed, which immediately means zero cash for you. Out of the remaining users, you’re relying on decent advertising to appeal to them.

The web is packed full of speculation that these users simply don’t click ads, which certainly isn’t entirely true. It is true however, that the average “Learn .NET in 24hrs Online!” ad will not appeal to one of these guys. In fact the majority of the targeted ads seem to be advertising training courses for languages that these guys abhor. Training courses in .NET/C#/J2EE/Delphi will never appeal to your average technology website reader, and this helps propagate the rumour that users don’t click ads and therefore Adsense doesn’t work. In truth the same people who complain about visitors not clicking their ads, most likely don’t click ads on articles they read. They complain about the problem, without realising they are the root cause. The tech community needs to either do away with pay per click advertising altogether, or to ease up on the adblocking and start clicking on ads that are of interest.

The other significant factor that everyone forgets is that the combined readership of dig/reddit/del.icio.us/slashdot/etc is probably about 1-5% of the internet. There is a gardening blog I know of, which makes about €1,000 euro per month through Google ads. There is a kitchen designs site I’ve seen that earns something similar. Both sites achieve this with about 4-5 thousand page views daily. How? Normal non-technical users will click ads because 1) They’re not blocking them and 2) They’re good advertisements.

Summary

If you run a mildly popular technology based website, then maybe Adsense won't do it for you. I can't recommend any other products because it's just not easy to try them out. Pay Per Click sites whether its Adsense or Blog Kit, or Adbrite or whatever all have a minimum payment before you actually get your cash. Which means that part of your "trying it out" means you are stuck with them until you earn a certain amount of cash (between $30 and $100 dollars usually) before you can cash out and move somewhere else. For most sites this takes a long time, so your "test drive" is more like a commitment than it is a trial.

The other style of internet advertising is renting space on your site (e.g a 728x90 banner) for a certain amount per month. Typically these sites (e.g. Text-Link-Ads etc) won't touch you unless you have a certain Alexa Ranking, a certain number of inbound links, a certain number of hits per day etc, so thats not an option for most people.

For technology sites Adsense isn't ideal, but I can't find a better provider at the moment. If you have a popular web application don't use advertising as your main revenue, unless your users come from the other 95% of internet users (the people who don't refresh Digg every 3 minutes), in which case it will work OK. Thats certainly how its going for Bigulo.com anyways.

A while back I wrote a summary of many web2.0 companies when I said...

If you build it, they might come. If you have a nice website they might stay. If you offer a free service, they might use it. If you've gotten this far without thinking about where the cash comes from, you're in trouble.

For advertising based ventures, it's more like...

If you build it, they might come. If you have a nice website they might stay. If you offer a free service, they might use it. If they don't use adblockers, and your ads are very well targeted, and pay something more than 1c per click, then you just might make enough to buy coffee each day, but not if you drink in Starbucks.

Related Linkage:

• How to change the world - A weblog by Guy Kawasaki
• A tour of Google Adsense
• Adblocking Software Use Adblocking software to remove Noisy Flash Ads, and ridiculous DHTML overlay adverts. Go easy on the rest, they're paying someones wages usually.
• Bigulo ~ a super cool social search engine created by Andrew and myself. I'll talk more about that later.

Update: I've been mailed by Chris asking if those "Learn the hidden secrets of AdSense" books and sites are any use. In short No. Not at all. Remember those advertisements in shitty magazines that say "I made 20,000 euro in just one month. Buy this book to find out how!". Well, the contents of that book basically said "Put an advertisement in a magazine saying you made €20,000 in one month and charge people a ridiculous price for this book you're reading". Thats pretty much what these "The forbidden tricks of Adsense" websites are doing. They basically say "Start a blog saying you know how to make millions on Adsense, tell them its all about positioning and coloring of the ads, or some crap like that. These same suckers will then click on your ads and buy your overpriced 3 page eBook. Zing!". Still, at least those guys have a revenue model

Update 2: I forgot to mention a second significant reason why Adsense will never pull too much cash for tech websites. RSS. Most of the visitors will never see the ads in the first place, as they are busy reading the article through their own newsreader. And RSS /NewsReaders are incredibly popular amongst the tech readers, even as a result of this site going on reddit I've seen a spike in subscriptions.