
So you were thinking of using adsense to generate income? Think again - jacquesm
http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/So+you+were+thinking+of+using+adsense+to+generate+income+-+Think+again
======
patio11
Google has historically not been very open about this, but they're _very_
gradually becoming more transparent on ad pricing: their cut is 32% for ads on
the content network, so the advertiser is getting charged $1.47 for every $1
you see in your stats.

See: [http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-
share.ht...](http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html)

Their customer service is abyssmal. This is intentional. Everyone doing
business with Google needs to go into that relationship with eyes wide open in
that respect.

reocities.com probably got banned because -- and this is a pretty important
concept -- there is no incentive for their Indian quality rater to think "Hmm,
although in five seconds that sure _sounds_ like it is a typosquatting spam
site which is infringing on the Geocities trademark and built on industrial
strength copyright violation, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt
and investigate this thoroughly."

Typically, AdSense pays much, much more poorly than individually negotiated
advertising buys, which is why most major sites use it only for placing
remnant inventory. (It isn't called "webmaster welfare" for nothing.) You also
get the best results of it if your page is essentially an extension of
someone's Google search, which is why eHow gets $2.50 CPMs from just one of
the thirteen ads on their bingo-related pages: their traffic is overwhelmingly
(60%) direct from Google for queries with demonstrable intent in commercial
areas. (This is better than quadruple the performance of most sites I
advertise on. _sigh_ I'm giving aid and comfort to the enemy.) Demand Media
_gets_ the psychology of advertising. Other people wanting to do it should
study and study well.

~~~
Experimentalist
"Typically, AdSense pays much, much more poorly than individually negotiated
advertising buys"

What you are saying is true in some but not all cases... It's a bit more
complicated than that and depends on how targeted your app/site is, as well as
how much traffic you are getting.

Small startups with a lot of possible advertising topics can't solicit every
possible niche. You would have to have a sales person selling bingo ads one
minute, then the other niche, then the other niche etc. and then manage all
those relationships.

What Adsense does is manage all that for you. No salesperson investment, no ad
software investment, no prospecting etc. Also, Adsense does some other things
like customizes the ad to the user's behavior (across sites), not just the
page content.

Maybe what you are saying makes sense in the case of Demand Media because they
have a lot of sales people.

But it's not practical for a small startup if they cover more than a few
topics. They will end up with less-targeted run of site ads with lower CPM and
more ad management headaches.

~~~
il
If you're a startup with lots of possible advertising topics, and monetizing
with advertising, you're probably a UGC/social media site. Advertisers will
see you as not much more than a glorified general discussion forum, and pay
accordingly.

Forum traffic, unless it's very targeted to a specific niche, does NOT convert
well. You won't get a good CPM no matter what. The exception to this rule is
for social networks, who know enough about their users to allow demographic
targeting. Even then, the CPM isn't great(I pay less than 20 cents CPM on
Facebook for example). Social networks make up for this on volume, because
social apps tend to generate a lot of pageviews.

That said, you will still do better with ad sales people even if you're
selling general, untargeted inventory, especially if you're selling to brand
advertisers.

Every couple weeks I get pestered by ad sales people from some second-tier
social network who are willing to do almost anything to get an IO and
commitment for a large number of impressions. Sometimes this works, even for
low-quality traffic. It's possible to sell almost any kind of traffic as long
as the numbers are right, and the benefit of having ad sales people, at least
good ones, is that they can sell large blocks of inventory to big advertisers
at once and hopefully maintain a relationship if the traffic backs out.

As for Demand Media, you're wrong about how banner buys work. If I go to
cracked.com, which has lots of diverse content(and low-quality traffic), I
don't see ads that are targeted to the categories or specific niches. I see
banner ads from big CPG advertisers doing branding sitewide.

~~~
Experimentalist
"Forum traffic, unless it's very targeted to a specific niche, does NOT
convert well. You won't get a good CPM no matter what."

No, I'm talking about informational and news/blog sites that have hundreds or
thousands of subtopics. They can get excellent CPMs with Adsense.

"That said, you will still do better with ad sales people even if you're
selling general, untargeted inventory, especially if you're selling to brand
advertisers."

No that's not true, unless you have a big enough company to support a lot of
salespeople and really high untargeted traffic -- which is not most startups.
(That's why I mentioned in my original reply that it partly depends on your
traffic.)

"you're wrong about how banner buys work"

No I'm not wrong. First, I'm not interested in developing an app to sell low
CPM banners. Low CPM means you are untargeted--I'm targeted. Second, the vast
majorty of people on this site and doing startup do not have boatloads (100s
of thousands of pageviews per day) to justify the type of ad buying your are
recommending. They don't have the time nor overhead capacity to hire a staff
of salespeople. Nor, do they need the headache of managing them.

They would be better of with Adsense.

"As for Demand Media, you're wrong about how banner buys work."

Actually Demand Media does both -- they _are_ using Google Adsense, its lower
on the page often integrated into the articles.

------
jdietrich
I've said it before and I'll say it again - Adsense is remnant advertising,
it's what you do to fill up the crap space that you can't sell yourself. In
every other medium, network advertising is considered an option of last
resort.

In the traditional media, advertising sales is a crucial function. A publisher
lives or dies on the competence of their ad sales department and their ability
to convince advertisers that space in their publication is worth more than
just eyeballs.

It's obvious to all of us that a click isn't just a click. There are quality
clicks and bad clicks. There is clear value in advertising even with no direct
response. It's up to you as a publisher to convince advertisers that your
readers are richer or more spendy or more enthusiastic or more easily
persuaded than Joe Random.

Print publishers laugh at us for our naïveté. As online publishers, we just
don't have the cultural sense that our job is to match up advertisers with
people who want to be advertised to. That's the real value-add of ad-supported
media, the content itself is just a hook to attract and retain the right
demographic.

Ad sales is an active pursuit. If you're waiting for people to find you,
you're doing it wrong. If you're expecting advertisers to know what space to
buy, you're doing it wrong. If you're not thinking in terms of campaigns and
strategy, you're doing it wrong. If you're not pursuing ongoing relationships
with agencies, you're doing it wrong.

If you were an advertiser, would you buy advertising from you?

~~~
davidw
> Ad sales is an active pursuit. If you're waiting for people to find you,
> you're doing it wrong. If you're expecting advertisers to know what space to
> buy, you're doing it wrong. If you're not thinking in terms of campaigns and
> strategy, you're doing it wrong. If you're not pursuing ongoing
> relationships with agencies, you're doing it wrong.

Ok, sounds fair. How do you go about doing that? I have a site,
<http://langpop.com> that could use some better advertising than AdSense, but
I don't have a very good idea about how to track someone down that would pay
to advertise on it.

I have some other sites where there's a more direct connection that I could
make between who might want to advertise, and thus chase those deals a little
bit more easily, but with that, and others that I've done, selling ads just
isn't in my repertoir of skills. You've convinced me that either it should be
or I should find someone who is good at it... any ideas how? AdSense is very
easy to get started with.

~~~
mkr-hn
Go find companies that sell programming related products like IDEs and
libraries, go to their corporate site, find the person most like a marketing
representative, and pitch your ad space to them.

~~~
davidw
Hrm. Are there any steps in between that and AdSense? I'm not sure it's a
terribly efficient solution:

* I'm not a great sales guy, and the opportunity costs (consulting money) are not insignificant.

* I don't have a good idea of how much to sell space for.

* Other people have to have a better handle on this stuff than I do. If they can make me more money than I would alone, why not split it? Or at the very least, make me more money than AdSense and not make me waste my time trying to track down companies ("Hi, uh, IBM, want to buy some ads?")

~~~
jdietrich
The first and last step is to start thinking about the 'true' purpose of your
website - as a lead generation tool, a system that converts interest into
sales prospects. You're the very top of the sales funnel.

The essential purpose of langpop.com is to establish which languages are most
popular. Implicitly, most people coming to your site are trying to work out
which language is 'best'. The obvious strategy is to work your website towards
answering that question and in the process gaining more information about your
visitors and their purchasing intent.

As it stands, the only thing we know about anyone on your site is that they
have some vague interest in programming languages. The more concrete our
picture of your visitors, the more precisely we can target advertising, the
better it will convert and so the more you can charge for it. The Adsense
algorithm tries to do this implicitly, but it does it relatively poorly.

For example, the "about the languages" section could be expanded massively,
with a (keyword-dense) review of each language and (affiliate) links to books,
tutorial material, IDEs, code review tools and so on. Adsense links on these
pages should see better bids and better clickthrough, but that's entirely
secondary.

~~~
photon_off
Spot on. For an example of a site that takes broad interest in tech and tries
its best to funnel it, look at <http://builtwith.com> , particularly the
"build" tab.

They provide a list of affilaite linkbait for each technology you might be
interested in. It's not that bad.

------
vaksel
the problem with adsense is 3 fold:

a) ad blindness...people have learned to ignore those text links just like
they've ignored the banner ads. The only way to actually profit off adsense is
to design your entire site around the ad.

b) adblock - more and more people are blocking ads, so you get less and less
revenue

c) ad efficiency - more and more advertisers are starting to recognize that
the quality of traffic on the display network are crap so they pay MUCH less
for it. The CPC on the keyword tool may be $2 per click...but in reality
you'll only get 15-20 cents for adsense

So once you pair all of that up...you realize that it takes 30,000 visitors to
make $50 a month on adsense.

And yes at scale you can still make a buck...but why would you bother if there
are many better options out there?

Sell a single ad space for $100/mo and you double your profit. Sell 3 ad
spaces, and you increase it 6 fold.

Or forget ads altogether and go premium. If you get conversions down to 1:200
after you optimize the sales page/price...that 30,000 people turns into 150
sales. So even if you go with a cheap $5/mo subscription option, that turns
into $750/mo...recurring. Or if you decide to charge $19.99, you end up with
$3K.

The only reason to use adsense is to have something generating revenue until
you decide to get serious with your site.

~~~
jacquesm
> The only reason to use adsense is to have something generating revenue until
> you decide to get serious with your site.

I see styleguidance.com still has google ads ;)

~~~
vaksel
and auto-conversion to affiliate links, and some ad sales.

but yeah I could do more with it

------
hooande
AdSense was designed to help Google offload their abundance of keyword
inventory. They have millions of people bidding on keywords. Web pages have
keywords. So AdSense is a great tool to help them sell what they already have.

Adsense wasn't designed with increasing publisher revenue in mind. Google
doesn't operate it as a primary business and the revenue ig make pales in
comparison to search advertising. That's why they don't act like any sane
business when it comes to customer service. Ads might stop working. They
certainly won't give you answers as to why. You may make a lot of money or
only a little this month. On the whole, they don't care.

Google has actually changed the name to "Google Display" and a lot of the ads
that I see are retargeted. I don't know if this is actually increasing
publisher revenues, but I would love to hear first hand about that from the HN
community.

By and large, AdSense will work well for you if a high percentage (>60%) of
the traffic to your site is based on search queries. It works best as an
extension of the search advertising process. If you have a community or user
generated content, then you'll need to find another solution.

------
ambiate
While adsense was my main route of raman profit, I'm considering to converting
to something like fiverr. Creating domains and websites every 2 weeks for a
niche is fun/mind numbing/building {research|programming} skills, but if I can
just score two gigs a day on fiverr I can typically match/overcome my adsense
on 2 sites. Without the hassle of updating, maintaining, and worrying about my
{linode|sites|keywords}. There's also the fact that domains go stale after a
niche dies off, so, domain renewals etc.

Now if I have the opportunity to snag a domain about the bp oil spill before
it gets in mainstream media and snag in $30+ a day... adsense might be my
piece of cake again.

You can't completely knock adsense... its basically nonsense advertising. You
never contact google, they never contact you (unless you violate the 1 page,
10 sentence ToS). My girlfriend and my uncle both use it and had a harder time
setting up a facebook account.

------
terra_t
daz.com looks like a f __ing spam site to me; I've got Markov Chains that make
sites that look more honest than that. If you want to make a living making
sites like that you've got to spam the f __k out of them so you get a lot of
money fast, and be careful to make up phony identities so you can keep getting
new adsense accounts and not get your new domains burned.

Once you've got a good content gen system, the really interesting question
becomes: "how do I create protective coloration so that I can pass site
reviews?"

daz.com obviously answers that one poorly

~~~
jacquesm
> daz.com looks like a fing spam site to me; I've got Markov Chains that make
> sites that look more honest than that.

I'm sure the 60,000+ users that put it together over the last couple of years
will be appreciative of that comment.

> If you want to make a living making sites like that you've got to spam the
> fk out of them so you get a lot of money fast, and be careful to make up
> phony identities so you can keep getting new adsense accounts and not get
> your new domains burned.

That was not the plan.

> Once you've got a good content gen system, the really interesting question
> becomes: "how do I create protective coloration so that I can pass site
> reviews?" > daz.com obviously answers that one poorly

Well, for some reason it passed those 'site reviews' for the first couple of
years with flying colours, and then overnight the ads stopped working and
there is no way to get an answer out of google _why_ that happened, given a
multi-year business relationship that wasn't too much to ask for.

It's their right to disable those ads based on whatever the terms-of-service
are, but the least they could do is:

    
    
       (1) tell me about it
    
       (2) do that without being asked
    
       (3) point out which part of their terms-of-service was violated
    

Rumour has it that the site was blocked because it contains the word 'hard-
core', which refers to a music genre, not to porn, but we've not been able to
get that substantiated either.

~~~
terra_t
Well, when I look at the site I see a random jumble of one-liners, non-
sequitors and meaningless links. If you got 60,000 people to make that site,
you really wasted their time (and yours.)

Just take a look at a page like:

<http://daz.com/artists/Glenn%20Miller.html>

I mean, the top of that page repeats "trombone 0000 - 0000 delete" hundreds of
times... That page just screams "this is trash"

there's no human voice obvious there, no attempt to contextualize or organized
anything. I could scrape that stuff off some other sites and make something
better looking in a week. Then I'd drop a few million spam links on it, expect
to collect adsense for 2 months, then close the bank account.

~~~
jacquesm
> I mean, the top of that page repeats "trombone 0000 - 0000 delete" hundreds
> of times...

It does that 6 times, once for each member of the band. The '0000 - 0000'
texts are placeholders for unknown dates, the delete links allow you to remove
that entry in case it is mistaken.

All the edits are then piped in to a holding tank where they're verified
before being made part of the page. This results in very little attempts to
spam the site, on the 'no broken windows' theory, nobody ever made it through.

> there's no human voice obvious there, no attempt to contextualize or
> organized anything. I could scrape that stuff off some other sites and make
> something better looking in a week.

I believe you. But it has to start somewhere. Maybe you'd be scraping this
one...

> Then I'd drop a few million spam links on it, expect to collect adsense for
> 2 months, then close the bank account.

I see.

I'm beginning to understand why adsense is the way it is, thank you for
enlightening me.

~~~
stevejohnson
As trollish as the guy you were responding to is, his criticism about the
site's design doesn't strike me as totally inaccurate. I would encourage you
to tweak it to, as he said, make the 'human voice' more obvious.

~~~
jacquesm
That's tricky because the whole idea behind daz is to register the 'graph', so
the majority of the data consists of artists, bands, song and album titles,
dates and connections between those.

It's like a giant network of musical collaboration, hard to give that a
'voice'. It's major use is to find music by bands that are related through one
or more members.

------
Experimentalist
This article is a misguided gross oversimplificaton of the issue.

I agree that you shouldn't _only_ rely on adsense the rest of your life. But
if you are starting with either solid CPM targeted traffic or a lot of traffic
or both, then it's a good way to get begin booking some revenue.

Why? If you are a developer you probably don't want to spend your initial days
soliciting people for advertising instead of developing your product.

Plus, Adsense can more effectively target customers than the few companies you
solicit with your meager resources.

------
endlessvoid94
All I know is this: I'm making $50 / day from adsense. That pays my rent in
San Francisco.

I'm currently in the process of acquiring direct advertiers, but I'd have to
disagree with the author about using adsense as direct income.

------
ehsanul
I'd like to know more about what other ad networks were appraised, and why
they were no good. I'm going to have to rely on ad networks for my own web
app, at least for a while, and it would be pretty helpful if there was was
decent customer service on the inventory side.

~~~
jacquesm
I've looked at: adbrite, adroll, tribalfusion and a bunch of others after
asking HN if I should go and make an inventory of advertising networks and how
well they perform relative to each other.

None of them comes close to adsense in terms of performance (and adsense
absolutely sucks, if you can get $1.00 ECPM out of adsense for a large volume
website then you're very very lucky), so even if they would handle customer
service better than google (most of them don't) they would still be pretty bad
income wise.

~~~
javery
You should try to find vertical ad networks, these are the ones getting the
higher ECPMs ($5-$20). I run a couple programmer focused networks, but there
are networks out there for just about anything. Here are some off the top of
my head:

<http://www.sportgenic.com/> \- sports focused

<http://www.glammedia.com> \- Gender based

<http://www.halogennetwork.com> \- Influentials

<http://www.longboardmedia.com/> \- Consumers/Shopping

~~~
DennisP
Kudos for not pumping your own stuff, but...what are these programmer focused
networks?

~~~
javery
The Lounge (.NET developers) - <http://theloungenet.com>

Ruby Row (Ruby developers) - <http://rubyrow.net>

------
ry0ohki
The author's point about Google's support is the key one. Even if your site is
generating Google thousands of dollars, it's impossible to get a human if
something goes wrong. As an AdSense publisher (and purchaser) I'd gladly pay
some monthly premium to be able to contact Google support.

------
JonM
I used to get a £0.20 ($0.31 US) eCPM for 0.33% CTR
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1136710>), however, after getting a call
from a Google account manager who had some extra inventory to shift for June,
we've since been seeing (£0.39) $0.61 eCPM.

Tip: if you have some UK or German traffic, consider Adjug
(<http://www.adjug.com/>) you can set a CPM floor (we set £0.40) and your own
backfill. We are setup like this:

Premium Ads (via our agent) > £1 guaranteed backfill > £0.40 backfill (Adjug)
> Adsense & House Ads

The only problem is slight delay in tags loading is one of the servers is
slow.

------
corin_
Ultimately you should be looking at selling your own adverts anyway (or at
least using a genuine advertising agency who can pull in decent targetted
adverts), then you won't have problems with Analytics, and you'll also make a
hell of a lot more money.

~~~
buro9
I'm looking at selling my own adverts and I have advertisers wanting to give
me their money and copy.

Does anyone know of a system to automate that stuff?

What I'm looking for needs to have:

* Allow advertisers to upload copy and request an advert slot.

* Allow an advert slot to be time-based regardless of number of impressions (1 month in a slot that rotates 10 adverts).

* Send me an email when a slot has been booked so that I review the advert against the end user agreement (that it's not abusive, totally inappropriate).

* That I can approve an advert and then it sends a message to the advertiser with an invoice and requesting payment.

* That the advertiser then pays via Google Checkout, PayPal, etc.

* That after all of that the advert goes live for a scheduled period of time.

* That the advertiser can see impressions, stats and reports letting them know the success of their campaign.

* It should look professional and ideally be themeable/skinnable or self-hosted so that I can make it seamless (the advertisers want to deal with me... I want to reduce my work).

Basically... aside from me approving the content I want a system that hand-
holds the advertiser through the whole process and shoves the advert on the
site and just gives me the money at the end.

I have 4.5 million page views per month, on a very strong community website.

What I've seen out there that does part of the above doesn't do the whole
story... I'm quite willing to pay to get the above.

I'm probably just not googling for the right terms, what should I be looking
for?

At the moment I'm leaving money on the table because my time and sanity is
more important to me than the money. I realise that this isn't the best
business sense and so either I find some tool to help me, or find the time to
build one myself.

~~~
arn
The self serve ad market has been grossly ignored. A good startup opportunity.

<http://buysellads.com> does some of it, but is very limited in the options
(30 day buy only).

<https://www.isocket.com/> promises to do more, and seems like a very
promising option. it's in private beta now. So, I haven't tried it.

~~~
toddynho
One thing that is very important to understand when selling ads on your own is
how those ads are actually sold. Depending on your site, the niche, and how
much time and effort you put into the ad sales process, results can vary
greatly. At the end of the day, the only thing that REALLY matters is if ads
are sold or not sold. Software alone, in my opinion, won't get the job done.
With roughly 2 and a half years of data from running BSA, less than 20% of ad
sales come from a publishers website directly - sure, some sites are higher
and some are lower, but 20% is the average (and we're in a tech savvy space).

One of Arn's sites, for example, came into BSA with a handful of ad sales.
And, once we worked with him and his team on pricing and marketed the site to
our existing advertiser base in the iphone niche, his sales soared. I don't
know the exact numbers, and I doubt Arn would appreciate me sharing these here
- but it's safe to say that his ad sales at least tripled once he joined BSA.
In this case, it wasn't the software, it was our ability to sell ads for his
site.

The point I'm trying to make: there are a billion ad networks out there. Do
some research on them before using them, try some out, and find the ones that
sell for YOUR site the best. And, if you can sell ads on your own, do it -
hard code them into the site, have people pay you via PayPal, and use a
network to supplement those sales.

Full disclosure: I run BuySellAds.com

~~~
bgeorgescu
Would be interested in exploring opportunities to work with you guys on
ipodtouchfans.com (site in same space as arn's). My email is username at
gmail.

~~~
toddynho
sent you an email a couple days ago, maybe I got the address wrong? :)

if you didn't get anything, can you ping me at todd@buysellads.com so that I
make sure I have the right email address?

we would kick ass for ipodtouchfans.com, very nice fit with our existing
inventory and advertiser base.

------
grovulent
Couple of things I've noticed about adsense - have no idea if they apply here,
but maybe it hasn't been considered.

If the colour of the links and whatnot are two similar to what you are using
on the site (particularly if they are positioned to look much like links) the
ads can fail to appear. This has happened to me a few times and I've changed
the colour to have them up and working again within a few minutes.

Another thing - I've also had pages fail to display adsense where the content
is exactly the same as another page serving adsense (botched url structure in
my case).

I assume you've tested these things - but figured it may be worth mentioning
anyway. You never know.

------
fookyong
"And today, it happened again. This time on reocities.com, my rescue attempt
for geocities where it helped to pay for the hosting. After serving up the ads
for a while suddenly I'm shown a nice blank rectangle where the ads were
before. No explanation"

Uh... maybe the fact that it's a bunch of stolen content?

To the OP, I realise you're trying to do a noble thing, but that content is
not public domain. Trying to preserve it is cool. Trying to profit off it is
not so cool. Bit of a grey area and it's easy to just turn you off than get
into some heated, obviously biased discussion with the site owner.

~~~
jacquesm
> Trying to profit off it is not so cool.

I don't think that 'profit' means the same to you as it does to me. At adsense
income levels reocities will _never_ be profitable, and I have a couple of
_thousand_ thank you notes collected by now that prove that on the whole
people are pretty happy that I did what I did.

People that request removal of their pages have it backed up now (I do that
for whoever asks to create a zip file of all their content), and those that
don't want their old stuff online any more because it is either inaccurate or
because they can't update it (reocities is 'read only').

In some cases they want it removed because they put private info online back
when everybody did that or because they are now professional designers and
don't want their geocities stuff to haunt them.

And, of course, whoever asks has their content removed, once every month or so
I filter my inbox on 'reocities' and 'geocities' to process the removal
requests.

It's still a manual process, that's how little it gets requested, but I
probably should automate it somehow.

If in the long run reocities contains no pages and all the stuff has been
moved to the proper owners again then I'll be more than happy, that would be
the best outcome.

Having some adsense ads in there was a way to offset some (but not all by a
long shot) of the hosting costs.

~~~
dingdingding
Why don't you spend an hour or two and make it read/write ?

~~~
jacquesm
Because I'd be flooded with spam.

~~~
dingdingding
That's not necessarily true. I agree with the other guy that you are really
just scraping content and trying to profit off it. If people really wanted to
save their content, they could have done that. Most of what you have is
probably abandoned.

~~~
jacquesm
> I agree with the other guy that you are really just scraping content and
> trying to profit off it.

You can agree with him as much as you want, it just isn't true.

> If people really wanted to save their content, they could have done that.

Part of the problem here was that yahoo did a pretty bad job at communicating
their intention to the people that had their sites there. Essentially Yahoo
tried to convert the 'holdouts' from the free portion of the site to paid
hosting accounts 'or else'. When they pulled the plug it left 10's of millions
of accounts up in the air.

There were several attempts at rescuing as much of geocities as could be done,
the fact that you don't know any of this isn't really your fault, after all
your account is all of 40 minutes old, but when it happened it was fairly
widely publicised both here on HN and in the regular media.

> Most of what you have is probably abandoned.

You'd be surprised.

------
MC27
Adsense was amazing for the first year, but after it became mainstream, the
rates fell drastically.

If your website has a strong brand and design (i.e. isn't a blog) then there's
lots of alternatives that pay better.

~~~
jacquesm
> there's lots of alternatives that pay better.

Such as ?

~~~
MC27
It depends on the topic that your website specialises in. Determine that, then
search for ad networks and rep firms that represent those areas. If you find
the right service and you are well know enough within the niche, they will
personally pitch your website to their clients.

------
davidw
(BTW, copyright statement still says 2009 on daz.com)

~~~
jacquesm
Good catch, thank you! (fixed)

~~~
cdr
Why put a date on the copyright at all?

~~~
davidw
A few minutes of Googling:

[http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=48127#post53...](http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=48127#post539251)

------
krainboltgreene
My father makes about $400.00 a month from adsense. He's been working with it
for at least a year, and he'll probably be making five as much as that in
another year.

