Forum Moderators: martinibuster
While everyone around us said we where nuts to continue to put in literally hundreds of hours a week into websites that where making us much less then our college degreed jobs we had a vision of the future and just could not let it go.
Greedy companies came and went by the thousands but still we held on and produced high quality content for our ever-increasing network of sites. Enter Google adsense 4 years later. We quite literally went up 4000 percent in income overnight. We couldn’t believe the amount of revenue Google was sharing with us?
The little guys, the guys that had been stepped upon and backstabbed by every greedy corporate slimebag out there for the last 4 years watched in utter amazement as this company made all of there dreams come true overnight.
I have an autistic son and always wanted to have a swimming pool with a big fenced yard for him and a big house for my family, and Google has given them that.
Yes I worked hard and so did my friends but Google has NOT been greedy, they shared what others didn’t. They rewarded us for our quality users and content with there ingenious method of advertising.
They have changed our lives forever.
So as things heat up in the war with MS and Yahoo who are basically allied at this point against you G, I just wanted to share with you Google and the public how much you have changed our lives. You proved us right, you showed my family and friends we where not nuts all these years and you made everyone I know ask what I do for a living:)
Thank you Google for everything and have a happy holidays!
Has it been worth it... it's getting there.
I'll likely get skin cancer thanks to adsense allowing me to afford to spend the winter in florida.
Shame on you! Didn't you have a few dollars left over to buy sunscreen? :)
LOL. Good thing Google isn't one of those "greedy" companies. This thread is a joke, right?
I gave up 2000 banner ads, because the payment was a joke.
I got every some month a check around $40 from overture for showing their search box on my local search engine. 2, later 1 cent per visitor.
I tried some affliant programs, how can they survive with such a terrible conversion rate?
June 5th 2004 was the big turning point as I started AdSense.
This thread is a joke, right?
It should be but I think the OP meant it in all seriousness. It's hilarious that some here won't ever see that Google doesn't know their personal circumstances... and doesn't care. On their way to making money they have to give some of it away - that's the only way they could have got ads on all that private inventory on your sites and mine! They sat and took a business decision as to how much of the ad revenue they gave away. "Give away" too little and you won't get enough publishers on board, "give away" too much and it's obviously going to hit the bottom line. The actuaries/mathematicians worked out the minimum percentage Google could pay out while grabbing the market share they wanted. And that's it!
No, sorry, I fell for it... the thread probably was just a wind up! ;) Who wants to sign up for my affiliate program selling Gooooogle deities? You rub them and you'll get a new swimming pool. Or regrow hair on your bald spot. Or maybe even cure the canonical problem, the 302 hijack, the autolink itch, the copyright violations of Google print, the bullyboy tactics of gmail.co.uk or even whisk away the whole supplemental database!
[edited by: oddsod at 9:22 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2005]
hmmm... well let's see...
not exercising like I used to (hardly get out of the house anymore, glued to the screen instead, checking stats like an addict, tweaking my sites, not doing my laundry... oh yes, and making a little money too. Thanks Google! :-)
Who wants to sign up for my affiliate program selling Gooooogle deities?
I'm open-minded. Tell me what the payout is, I'll run the numbers and get back to you.
Tell me what the payout is
To make $50,000 a year with affiliate programs that pay around 5% per sale, a website has to bring in $1,000,000 worth of business! A million dollars to make $50,000!
Thank you again G (I just read what I wrote).
Happy Holidays to you, drall, your family, and all the other enlightened members of WW.
Well I also joined AS 3 months ago, because our company is almost shutting down due to bad economy in my country, I have to look for an alternative way to earn money while doing my best - informative websites.
Now, after 3 months, my AS revenue are almost the same as my company salary. A very big help in times of my financial crisis. Thanks "G"
This thread is a joke, right?
No, it's all earnest.
In 1997 to 1999, I explained my clients
Altavista tries to deliver the best search results
DoubleClick tries to deliver the best ads for a search query.
But DoubleClick was only for the big players.
No chance for a small web site with just 25 thousand visitors a month.
The small ones had to live with anti targeted banner ads for some obscure companies.
10 Cent per click with 0,2% CTR because complete against the interests of the visitors.
Maybe also other big companies discussed system to let also smaller web sites in. But they did not do it, to much risk, to much effort to control.
But if you dig a little deeper, maybe you should temper your contentment. If they pay you $200, how much are advertisers paying for ads? Let's say $1,000. So in other words, people who are not you can find over $1,000 per day advertising to people on your website. That means they must make significantly more, maybe even double. So now we see the truth: Google is handing you $200 out of $1,000 they were paid by someone who made $2,000 out of your website!
If you're getting paid a lot by Google, rather than contentment, you should assess the actual value of your sites visitors, IMHO.
When a magazine fires a complete incabable sales man just selling $30 per month, they get exited when the new sales man makes with the same magazine $300.
I had until June 2004 only complete incabable sales man for the ad space.
Google built up a whole new industry by being the best reseller of ad space available.
This thread is a joke, right?
I doubt that very much - Google DOES make a big difference in people's lives. I say that as someone who's posting is often prone to ranting just how wrong Google have got it! I'd like to see big changes made in the way they deal with all of the people they are allowing to scam the system, but I certainly know where the OP is coming from.
In my case, it means that the fact my wife is having problems finding a job she can do whilst caring for the kids is not an issue. It means that I have been able to change careers in middle age and afford the pay cut to do it. It means that we can afford to go on family holidays we would never have dreamed of under our current financial circumstances.
All off the back of a hobby website I started developing in the late 1990's.
Adsense does make a big difference to people's lives - don't knock this fact. And don't knock the people that post to say so!
And don't knock the people that post to say so!
I don't recall anyone knocking those who are posting to say they're delighted with their Adsense earnings. There is a small minority however who see this money and delude themselves into believing they have a personal relationship with the large commerical entity, a partnership, a cosy friendship. They think that somebody there in Google is doing them a favour, is looking after them, appreciates the traffic they're providing. And, I wouldn't be surprised if there's the odd one who says a little prayer to the Google gods every night.
The issue is not whether Google got contextual ads into a massive user base of inventory. That's a given. The issue is not whether that's made a massive financial difference to a large number of sites/webmasters. That's pretty clear too. The issue is people thanking Google rather than the technology; people thanking Google rather than Google thanking them; people falsely believing that Google started Adsense for the benefit of the small publisher. They didn't! The only way Google could show a massive increase in earnings was by getting 400% of the search market (impossible!) .... or finding large quantities of other inventory to carry ads. The other inventory they found - your sites and mine - wouldn't have played ball unless Google shared the earnings, so that's what Google did. It's because of you that Google even has a future! Not the other way round. The fact that you're making money is a slight inconvenience for them but they put up with it because of the massive amounts they make out of the deal.
Which large corporate wants the admin and PR nightmare of dealing with tens of thousands of "small" customers? None! They bother to deal with you because that's required for them to make the bulk of their revenue.
[edited by: oddsod at 5:28 pm (utc) on Dec. 9, 2005]
But if you dig a little deeper, maybe you should temper your contentment. If they pay you $200, how much are advertisers paying for ads? Let's say $1,000. So in other words, people who are not you can find over $1,000 per day advertising to people on your website. That means they must make significantly more, maybe even double. So now we see the truth: Google is handing you $200 out of $1,000 they were paid by someone who made $2,000 out of your website!If you're getting paid a lot by Google, rather than contentment, you should assess the actual value of your sites visitors, IMHO.
I highly doubt that I am getting only 20% of what the advertisers are paying Google, for one thing. For another thing, I don't WANT to deal with the individual advertisers! I've done that. It's more of a pain than it is worth. With adsense I put the code up, I get paid. I don't have 12 individuals wanting a change here or there and I don't have to worry that all my advertisers are going to drop me or start grumbling if my SERPS slip for a while (which they do from time to time).
Adsense is profitable and elegant.
Thanks for this post! You'd be surprised how many Googlers read the WebmasterWorld forums, and this type of thread makes us even more excited about what we do.
We love hearing personal stories about how AdSense is helping our publishers enjoy their lives and spend more time creating the websites and quality content that make the Internet such an amazing resource. Seeing how you've been able to reward your families, spend more time on your hobbies and passions, and make big life changes because of AdSense is really inspiring for us.
Lots of AdSense employees were bloggers, writers, and web designers before we came to Google, so we understand how exciting it is to be able to get paid for doing something we love. We try to bring that perspective into supporting our product and our publishers.
And while we're all excited to come to work every day and continue to improve AdSense for the future, we also rely on your feedback and ideas. So thanks, everyone, for all the great suggestions you've provided over the years.
-ASA
