Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Where AdSense Makes Little Cents

Technology guru Guy Kawasaki has a popular blog (180,000+ pages views per month), but by relying on AdSense ads, he made just $9 a day. He recently laid out his lack of return on his time from one year of blogging, stating that the effective CPM of $1.39 wasn't nearly enough to sustain his blog.

While ranking #45 on Technorati's list of blogs is impressive for a first year blogger, Des Traynor points out that technology fans may not be the best audience for garnering click-throughs. Tech geeks aren't likely to buy products and will use ad blockers to eliminate the opportunity, he argues.

I write for three different blogs each day and recognize the challenges of making money by blogging. If AdSense is central to your business model, you might want to think about a new career. AdSense ads are small, and utterly boring to look at so that very few people would spend more than a fraction of a second glossing over the text. Why not link contextual advertising with display ads so that at least you have a snowball's chance of catching the occasional straying eye?

Unless you have millions of people coming to your blog each month, you need display ads or to be an affiliate to generate substantial scratch. This requires having a sales department so that you can sell ads at higher CPMs.

Along with finding an audience of consumers amongst your readership, generating revenue depends on relevancy, and Google's algorithm can often fall short. Finding readers who are prone to buy depends much on the category of your content, as well as how close to the consumer experience your writing gets. If you subject deals mostly in the realm of the theoretical, has nothing to do about commerce, and isn't written about in books that can be promoted, then you are in deep doo doo.

I'm still far from mastering the art of blogging for cash myself, but I knew going in that AdSense is a last resort for most writers.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 09:16 AM
Permanent Link: Where AdSense Makes Little Cents | Comments (2)

(2) Comments on Where AdSense Makes Little Cents

How's about singing up to CJ and looking over their many tech offers? I found out that today's tech users always go for good deals usually on hosting, domain names, computers especially laptops,... Really adsense won't get you anything.

Thank You

Comments by seo news blog : Tuesday, January 09, 2007 at 05:30 PM

Ah, the problem with the business model of blogging. I actually just wrote about that on my company's (Blanc and Otus) blog (http://echobase.blancandotus.com). While I'm no doubt coming from a PR industry perspective, I can't help but comment on the irony of the situation-- traditional media are losing their journalists and their advertising dollars to blogs. But yet, blogging doesn't really pay the bills. Quite the conundrum indeed.

Comments by Meredith Obendorfer : Thursday, January 11, 2007 at 12:17 AM

Post a Comment

Name:
Email:
WebSite:
Comment:
Remember Me
Subscribe