Does the Blog Bandwagon make Adsense?

monetizing blogs

[zulu_dude]

I'm thinking of starting a blogger type site where people can sign up for their own free blogs. Suffice to say that it will have some little tweaks and features that will tap into a relatively untouched market. So it's not just another blogger clone.

My question is this... realistically speaking, how difficult is it to monetise other people's blogs using adsense? Unfortunately most other threads discuss making money with one's own blog, which is not what I'm wanting to do.

I would obviously integrate the ad block really nicely into the templates, non-intrusive and pretty. The main concern that I have is targeting. On most of the blogs where I've seen adsense, all the ads are about blogging software, something I don't think many people would be interested in. I would guess that the ads would become more targetted as the post gets older, but by that time there won't be many people reading the post anymore!

Are there other/better ways of monetizing blogs that are as non-intrusive as adsense? I can't imagine anyone would be interested in having a blog with a gazillion popups and a daft crazy frog advert!

[ashii]

almost all of Blogs are created by users who want to make money out of it and drive traffic to their site.
I will never signup to a service which don't allow me to put my own ads(weather its adsense or other).

[valeyard]

Sorry to be negative but this sounds dangerous to me. How are you going to prevent your bloggers publishing material that breaches Adsense ToS? Sure, you can have your own ToS - but will that help if Google spot the dodgy content first? It's your publisher ID.

I'd be very wary of putting my Adsense code on any page where I don't control the content.

[zulu_dude]

A very good point... I had envisioned moderating the posts to some degree, but obviously this would prove to be impossible should the site grow as large as I hope it will! I suppose I could employ someone to check each and every post, but I don't think I'd make enough from adsense to even cover this, let alone server costs as well.

However, I don't agree that most people have a blog to drive traffic to their sites. There are millions of bloggers (myself included) who have a blog purely as an online journal/thoughtspace.

I don't suppose Google would care if people were violating my TOS by posting unsuitable material. All they would care about is that there is unsuitable content where their ads are displayed, end of story...

[JuniorOptimizer]

Don't 99% of all people abandon their blogs anyway?

[zulu_dude]

Haha, if that's true, I can totally believe it!

I suppose that if (optimistically) 5% of 10,000 people actively use their blogs, that translates to 500 active blogs. Of which about 10% would probably be interesting and read on a regular basis. Which means that only 0.05% of initial blog sign-ups would actually be worth putting adsense on anyway.

All of a sudden this doesn't seem like the brilliant idea that it was early this morning :-)

[ebuilder]

"All of a sudden this doesn't seem like the brilliant idea that it was early this morning :-)"

LOL. Most of my brilliant ideas come at night while falling asleep. Unfortunately, when I wake up I think wow what was I thinking.

[serengeti]

And won't your members start clicking on the ads on their blogs unless you specifically write rules telling them not too? But telling people not to click them will only makes things worse due to human curiosity on the part of other visitors!

[zulu_dude]

Serengeti, you raise an interesting question... would bloggers be going against the Google ToS by clicking on the ads?

Technically speaking, I think that the ads would be my ads, not theirs. So they would be allowed to click on them if they found them genuinely interesting. There would be no benefit in it for them, as all the revenue would come to me.