Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Build it grand and they will come.
Everything is possible, but the amount of time and resources involved into creating something half as good as Adsense without a site pulling in millions of pageviews a month, tens of thousands of visitors and a profitable topic is high.
Also since you are saying that you are not a coder, then things get complicated. You will need to be a coder/marketer/salesman/customer service rep all in one.
Also the amount of information that you would need in order to compare someone's individual system to adsense is probably more than what they are willing to provide in an open forum.
Maybe the other response was too harsh, but the answer is so clear that this might have prompted him to respond this way. Not very polite, I would say.
What does he mean add a point to a message #?
Everything you say about Adsense is very true. It's not that I think I could ever approach that level but, I know that I could prove to be a great referer for a more targeted clientel.
As it stands now, the Adsense ads I serve are mostly composed of direct competition to my site (I know I can block them within my account). My keywords are my competitors adwords hence, my dilemma.
I'm just wondering if there is not a fairly simple open-source refereral system out there. I'm not a coder but, I can understand code. I'm not Google but, I can understand the basics. Heck, I didn't even know the difference between a GIF and JPG two years ago.
Are you wanting to run your own AdSense-like program to make money? Getting advertisers to pay for CPC and then getting publishers on board to show the ads on a EPC basis, while you earn a % of each click? I think it might be difficult to find enough advertisers willing to pay, unless you are dealing with a very tight and specific niche.
The Advertising Sales & Affiliate Marketing [webmasterworld.com] forum might be a better place to ask for open-source scripts of this nature. Or start hunting through some of the script resources online, such as HotScripts.
If you are making X for your Adsense clicks, it only follows that you wonder how much more than X you could make serving on your own. I'm not looking for scripts, per se. The advice of those who have done both and have formed an opinion about the pros/cons of each is what I seek.
From a publishers point of view, the main point is the time taken to source advertisers. Using adsense is more or less like hiring an ad sales rep. They fill your adveretising space and pay you for it.
The only real exception I can think of is when your site is the leading authority for a given topic. In this situation site owners woudl be more than willing to pay for banners or text links.
Hope this is of some help.
Mack.
The magic of Adsense is that the advertisers, who perhaps have never heard of you, have heard of Google Adwords. So a company selling widget shipping containers buys adwords on the keyword widget. Their ad ends up on your site with information about widget manufacturing, with no contact between you and them. They have never heard of you and you have never heard of them, yet they are advertising on your site and you are sending them prospective customers, only because both of you have heard of Google.
I'm not concerned with the marketing aspects or mass exposure issues involved with trying to duplicate Adsense. Just because I wonder how to become President doesn't mean I want to be the President. Maybe I could be just a senator. It's all still boils down to understanding politics, in the end.
But as others have tried to convey, selling the ads is the hard part. You could publish a fashion magazine too, but try getting Ralph Lauren to buy a multipage spread. Google has enough trust (and market dominance) that advertisers come to them.
I'm just looking for input from Adsense users because, maybe with large acceptions, being invited into Adsense seems to give validity to your site and designer skills.
AdSense is like Amazon.com--its ads are found just about everywhere, so it's hard to see how they bestow any prestige or credibility. They can provide significant revenue, however, if you have the right topics and enough traffic.
As to whether you should consider creating a homegrown version of AdSense, I'd say "no." Why? Because the hard part isn't coding the ads--it's recruiting advertisers. With AdSense, advertisers don't even have to know you exist. If you have a page about glittering purple widgets and somebody's advertising that product through AdWords/AdSense, you'll get ads and revenues. That's a lot simpler, easier, and (in most cases) more profitable than trying to (a) make yourself known to advertisers and (b) convince those advertisers that they should be buying ads on your site.
However, even from a *technical* point of view things are not as simple as you might believe.
Sure, you can build (or buy) a system that will allow people to advertise on your site --but how will that work?
Perhaps the ad will be on every page, perhaps on some pages chosen by the advertiser --but AdSense will actually *analyze* an individual page and choose the *best* available ads for that page, based on the contents of the page, the keywords chosen by the advertiser, the bids for those keywords and even the *performance* of the ads...
When you add new pages with AdSense code to your site, you won't have to do a thing --highly targeted ads "automagically" start appearing within hours or even minutes!
I'm not saying such a system *can't* be built (it *has* been, and it's called AdWords), just saying that it won't be trivial...
Finally, consider the Fraud Factor. Google invests a lot of resources to make sure fraud is kept to a minimum, and advertisers trust Google (one of the best-known brands in the world!) to "do it right".
Now, I've never heard of you, I don't know about your business background, your ethics or even your programming skills, I only know that each reported click will cost me some money that will go directly to you. Tell me again why I should trust *you* to provide me with click stats? (This is *another* important reason why advertising intermediaries exist, apart from the aggregation issue.)
(BTW, by "you" in the previous paragraph I did *not* mean the original poster or any other specific person --I just wanted to illustrate what a potential advertiser would think!)
Have you considered a PPS (Pay Per SAle) system such as CJ? I've made some good progress codign an adSense like box and fillink it with targeted advertisers from CJ. PPS of course is more risky since you need to actually get the visitor to buy and not just click, but it can be way more rewarding, money AND karma...
SN
"There are no bad sales"
I have a site that involves specialized job placement. I place staff on a part-time basis and take a percentage for doing so. My specialized field overlaps several popular consumer interest topics that do not directly compete with what I do. Unfortunately, sites that are DIRECT competitors of mine(who, thankfully, suffer from poor SERP) are the main Adsense links that appear on my pages. There are a few consumer interest pay sites that I know would benefit from my site links and, are not competitors of mine.
Rather than listing every competitor site I want removed from my Adsense account, I was wondering how to set-up a Adsense-like system that I can market to these pay sites. I get the feeling from all the acronyms being thrown around, that there are several ways to implement and charge for referrals. What are the best ones to use if you are a sole webmaster?
I apologize to everyone for not being more specific in the begining. I never wanted/intended to become Adsense. It's just that it's my only frame of reference and experience.
