Why I want to move away from adsense
I have been using adsense to monetize all my websites for more than 7 years now. However I am getting a sense that while adsense is the perfect solution while starting a blog/ website, it is not so good for an established blog/website. That is the reason why 1 of the steps in my latest roadmap to blogging success was to think beyond adsense. My view just got a little more confirmed with this post from Ajith where he talks about blog income pattern with age and asks the question, why don’t the probloggers use adsense?
Here are some issues that makes me increasingly uncomfortable about adsense
- Bad dreams about getting banned from adsense keep me awake at night. I am kidding but Google is known to react in extreme manner to any violation of their guidelines. If I have to depend upon a single source for my online income, I shall like it to be more moderate and consultative.
- I can make no planning based on adsense income: To make matters worse, adsense income is extremely volatile. With the same traffic, same CTR, the final income tends to vary in a wide range. I can safely leave my day job and work online fulltime, only if someone guaranteed that the income will atleast continue to be at this level.
- Adsense performs extremely poor with regular visitors and social media traffic: I have got 2 sets of websites. The first set are websites that are created for long term value and to solve some problem. They have what you call quality content and get a lot of repeat visitors. While the second set are more of seo experiments/ projects and get their traffic from search engine but have crappy content. Guess what? I earn more money on my crappy websites from adsense. Unless I change my plan to create more crappy content, I better get a good alternative to adsense.
- Everyone and their cat uses adsense: While google has made the acceptance process more stringent now, they were allowing everyone and their cats to use adsense. That has sort of created an impression in the minds of the users that any website using adsense must be unprofessional.
- Adsense treats everyone as equal: I love democracy but only for forming governments. Unfortunately adsense uses the principles of democracy for websites as well. A car blog by the CEO of Toyota and my random ramblings about second hand cars will attract the same revenue per click.
What is your take? Do you need to move away from adsense as well?
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Great points SK. In fact, I have been trying to be creative with AdSense for a while now in terms of placement, colors, channel descriptions what have you. Still, the income is not very good. On the other hand, I might get good returns from my private Ad Sales if I increase the pricing. Also, the affiliate links are doing good these days.
I liked this statement
-> everyone and their cat uses AdSense
Well said. I don’t trust Adsense because of their irritating behavior on account management.
@Ajith,
Looking forward to some tips about your affiliate programmes man. I may try my luck as well
@Inkapoint
Agreer but the only problem is I am yet to get a really good alternative
You are absolutely correct.
And adsense may also getting $1 from the advertiser and giving the publisher only $0.1 .
But in the mean time their is no other trustful alternative for adsense. So we have to stick to it.
I have a different opinion here Sita, for simple reason Adsense adds recurring money and more over about your last point , it’s not true. Depending on the topic and well you have optimized your post for SEO, you can show the targeted advertisement.
Same articles on Car on Two different blogs can have different revenue.
Remember last time when Forex was on height, and people were getting arnd 22$/click from advertisement. But this is not the case from everyone…
@Harsh,
Are you saying that 2 different websites about forex catering to the same geography will have different earnings per click?
Great post again.
Sita, i am surprised to know that you are using adsense from past 7 years…
you are experienced campaigner…
I agree with you. But, i don’t know how to earn on private advertising and affiliate links. i get good traffic and also placed private advertising own and performancing ads. but very seldom the ad space get sold.
On affiliate links, idea is nil.
I don’t quite agree with you here. Thinking and planning “beyond” adsense is good, since dependency on any ONE income source is bad, but why to move away from it? And the fifth point of yours is absolutely wrong. If you have used adwords once you would know why its wrong.
“I love democracy but only for forming governments.” So true.
I have a small doubt. Once I removed Adsense totally from my blog and within a few days, I observed the decline in traffic from Google search engine. And as most of the netizens search for information using G itself, I think it was not a nice move and placed the ads again.
Just my 2 cents. Correct me if I am wrong.
awesome post….i always thought Adsense is the best PPC but your points has forced me to think again….Best of all #5….Adsense treat everyone equal which is unfair…
AdSense share in my monthly income is less than 10%. So i’m not concentrating or bothering about AdSense at the moment