BigDave - 4:44 am on Sep 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

Not that your reply deserves further comment, but here is more detail. It is detail that ANYONE here should be familiar with, because it is often included in advice about what sort of adsense sites make money. I'm going to be kinda specific and I ask the mods indulgence, to help make it clear for the clueless one.

I garden. I was interested in a product that I had heard of to make composting of food waste easier. It is a bucket that holds the waste and you inoculate the waste with certain microbes which basically pickle it so it doesn't putrefy.

I don't know how you shop, but I look for reviews. Yes, reading reviews is part of shopping. They are easy to find, you just search on [product name reviews]. Give it a try, it's easy. If you just go to online stores, you are a fool.

I read a few reviews, all were extremely positive. These aren't affiliate sales reviews, but people honestly taking about their experiences in fora and on their blogs. Some of these sites had adsense on them. In general, AdSense keyed in on the name of this product really well. It does that more often than not in most areas I'm interested in.

One site was having a sale on the item. It wasn't my preferred color, but it was about 30% cheaper than anyplace else. I bought it and I found several other things to buy as well. I also bought a seed drill, a Japanese grass sickle and 2 soil blockers. Total bill $248.37.

I'll probably write reviews of some of those items on my own blog at some point. If they get a good review (and I would write an honest review) someone might decide that they too would like one of those tools and find an ad that leads to a good price. If that happens, I'll make a small commission for my effort, but I'm not going to try too hard for it.

Somehow I think more people believe my story a hell of a lot more than they believe your's. You've been hanging around the AdSense forum for months, always knocking google, and now you are supposedly thinking about signing up for both adsense and adwords, when you don't believe that anyone will buy anything if they click on your ads, and you think the ads that show on your site will only make you a penny a click?!?!?!?

I've been with AdSense for about 20 months. If you read my posts you would know that most of my income comes from the low end clicks, under 20 cents. I also have some pages that get very few clicks, but they are always over $1 per click. I also run a site that gets more traffic than all my other sites put together, that has no ads on it, to protect the site's reputation as being unbiased like Consumer Reports, so I also look at it from that point of view.

Do you know how I found out how much I would make with AdSense? I signed up and tried it. Do you know how to find out if anyone buys anything after clicking on one of your ads? You sign up and try it.

Just stop imagining that everyone is like you. I don't hold it against a store for advertising their products, and I don't have a problem with an informational site running ads. That's the difference between us and you, we've tried the system. Our world didn't end. In the meantime, we've been making money.