Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Generally what areas generate the most CPC?
How much traffic would you need to make decent money?
"Ads may not be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant."
So, if you're going to build a site "for the sole purpose of AdSense," you'd better make sure you can fool Google into thinking it's a site that has value to the user. :-)
Is creating a site of content on a subject you enjoy, and before creating the site you know that you want to put AdSense on the site to regain your costs a bad thing?
It would seem to me that no, this is not a bad thing. Instead, it allows people to create a site on any subject they want, with AdSense allowing them to at least cover their costs in the vast majority of cases.
The way I interpret it is that they don't want people (a) creating dead-end pages on which clicking an ad is the easiest way to move on, or (b) shopping for ads by creating pages with a small amount of text targeted at high-value keywords.
I assume they started with finance for some reason, then last week went to politics. (Too late! Dean spent his $40 million already.)
Health is a big opportunity, too. Travel, of course.
But, the BIG opportunity in this is going to be entertainment. That's where the traffic is. Contextual linking articles about music into downloads should work.
What's nice, of course, is there is no competition in any of these areas.
If you want to seek out a trend, look for up and coming class action lawsuits. Lawyers are paying big $ for clicks from clients who are seeking <ahem> justice.
Also be aware that Google's program policies state:
"Ads may not be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant."So, if you're going to build a site "for the sole purpose of AdSense," you'd better make sure you can fool Google into thinking it's a site that has value to the user. :-)
Please. Google may state that policy, but they don't enforce it.
In the market where my biggest client advertises, almost every single AdSense advertiser is a site that was created to make money from AdSense. Most consist of one page. Many plaguize content from my client or their competitors. We have a lawyer write them a letter and take down the copyrighted material, but Google won't do anything about it - they won't kick them out of AdSense.
We were spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on "content ads" and we guessed less than 10% was legitimate traffic. The rest was probably friends and family and associates of the site owners. There's no way to be sure, but it appeared that the level of fraud was unbelievable. Worse than on any of the minor PPC services like Kanoodle or Enhance.
We shut off the "content match" on our Google AdWords account. We continue to advertise on search matches, which provide legitimate traffic. AdSense has really damaged Google's reputation for us and, I'm sure, for many PPC advertisers.
We might be willing to consider restarting "content match" if there is a serious increase in quality. For instance, if I ever see an AdSense site running our ads where the site has existed longer than 6 months or with a Google Page Rank higher than 2 or with actually meaty content that isn't just copied from government (public domain) websites or copyrighted websites.
Please. Google may state that policy, but they don't enforce it.
Not yet, perhaps, but I'm sure they're aware of the Pandora's Box they opened when they passed out AdSense accounts like Domino's pizza coupons.
We might be willing to consider restarting "content match" if there is a serious increase in quality. For instance, if I ever see an AdSense site running our ads where the site has existed longer than 6 months or with a Google Page Rank higher than 2 or with actually meaty content that isn't just copied from government (public domain) websites or copyrighted websites.
What's your product or service category, if I may ask? In the travel sector, there are plenty of legitimate sites--and to judge from the number of repeat advertisers I see, at least some of those advertisers are quite satisfied with the leads they're getting.
Not much value there, I thought. But he achieved his goal and all of the adsense ads were perfectly targeted. Unfortunately, this does affect us all as the impression by some advertisers gets degraded.
On the other hand, the issue of fraudulent clicks is another one that most be treated separately from "poor content quality", but that also should be monitored by Google in order to assure network quality.
