I've been on the fence about this for a while, and after reading what GroundUp wrote, I can't agree with them more. So I think it's time for me to dump Google Ads from my sites, as well. I send Big G three million ad impressions a month, and in return I get $150 and a bunch of visual dreck that makes the site look bad. $200, if I'm lucky. And this is all U.S. traffic on an award-winning news site. I only need to sell one more local ad to more than make up for the loss, and I get the extra benefit of having only quality, relevant advertising on my site.
So to quote GroundUp: "Obviously the behemoth in Mountain View won’t miss [us], but we take some pride in saying the feeling’s mutual."
3,000,000 for $150? That's criminal. How are you only getting 5 cents per thousand impressions? Are you getting really low quality traffic from far eastern countries or something? That's just extremely low even for Google. If your CTR is the problem, have you looked at placement optimization?
My recommendation is to sell the space directly on BuySellAds. At $1.00 CPM it would fly off the shelves, but you can get much more than that with a little patience (and provided that your visitors have at least some kind of quality).
One thing to remember is that publisher revenue is net Google's monetization cut. Publisher's see just 68% of ad revenue sold on their site. So $150 is really $220.58 in gross, which is significantly higher.
Another point to remember is that typically publishers only sell to Google AdSense their unsold (so-called "non-guaranteed") inventory. Typically you take this money because it's better than nothing, and because you couldn't sell this inventory yourself. Usually this non-guaranteed inventory has a lower value then the stuff you'd sell yourself.
There's a lot of reference-style material on news sites, and the CTRs on that are not bad. Just look at Wirecutter and its affiliate model.
That said, industry average for news display ads is about 0.05%... 1 click per 2,000 impressions. No bueno. Say 3m impression get 1.5k clicks, that's $0.33 CPC net or about $0.49 CPC gross.
Not necessarily, I have computer-related content which gets results like this (a bit better than this, but I assumed that the parent poster was exaggerating a bit about the 3x10^6 traffic). The problem is quite notorious, and AdSense now refuses new "tech" content.
I was under the impression that most modern blockers (uBlock etc) simply block that request from the site to the adserver, so no they wouldn't count as an impression.
I'm working on something that will benefit people who have high traffic sites that don't want to show their users ads. The basics are here: http://www.trussapp.com/ -- it's not quite ready for production, but if it's something you might be interested in, I'm looking for beta users. cam@trussapp.com
Small nitpick, and if you want some unsolicited feedback on that site: the GIF that shows a user using the site goes super slow and it would be a lot more engaging if the user typed faster.
Although I don't know how much I can blame this on connection problems on my end, it looks like it takes five seconds or so to type "Test Tester", when in my opinion it should take only one.
It's effectively the same thing, but it prevents users from having to leave your site to contribute. The hope is that it will increase donations because of that.
The amount of money you get from Google Adsense depends on the type of content. I looked at your profile but didn't find any information on what sites you might be running. Since this is hacker news, it might be that your site contains computer-related content. That type of content gets very low RPM. Still 3,000,000 impressions a month is quite a lot, so your site is obviously popular.
Put your site in your profile. We need to support businesses like your.
Google is no cake-walk from the other end either. As someone who has paid them for ads, over 70% of the clicks are...shall we say?... low quality. Of course if you only run Google Analytics you may never realize this, but if you cross-check with something else you will.
The idea that google can better qualify leads based on search results has basically failed. Online advertising needs to be treated the same as the other media: just a method of branding.
I much prefer to pay-per-view rather than -per-click. At least I feel like I'm getting what I pay for.
So to quote GroundUp: "Obviously the behemoth in Mountain View won’t miss [us], but we take some pride in saying the feeling’s mutual."