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Blog servers and AdSense

6 million hits. What should I do?

         

mike73

11:22 pm on Aug 30, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have my own blog server, like blogspot, except it's mine. I only have ads on the font page and the members' profile pages. The actual blogs are ad-free. My earnings are nothing to write home about.

I looked at my webstats for the first time in months and was surprised to see that I'm getting 6 million hits a month (mostly on the blog pages- not the pages where I have ads).

So now I have a dillema. It seems like putting ads on the blog pages would piss a lot of users off. Maybe a lot of my users would leave. Who knows? But jeeeez... 6 million hits a month! It's hard to resist. Or is it? What kind of income do you guys think I could get from 6 million hits on blog pages in Scandinavia?

fredw

11:33 pm on Aug 30, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I'm just the first to jump in here but many on this forum will tell you putting your own Adsense on blogs who's content you don't control is one of the fastest way to be banned from Adsense because of possible content in the blogs that's against Adsense TOS.

makes a little sense

12:07 am on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Yeah, I would imagine a large percentage of blogs deal with politics and other controversial things Google may not like.

Alioc

1:24 am on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Write to Google and request review and permission. There's a chance that they may let you go considering the volume of traffic.

greedy player

8:06 am on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)



Could be earning yourself 2000$-4000$ maybe more.

ann

10:51 am on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Do you mean hits or unique visitors? Quite a difference in the two.

Ann

photo200

11:11 am on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



You not control those blogs at all.
I would not risk my AS account.

Put Adbrite (for instance) - all kind of topic allowed.
Much smaller revenue but at least safe way to go.

carguy84

12:21 pm on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



If by hits, you mean hits, then it's impossible to tell what kind of real traffic you're generating.

Pageviews and Users/Sessions are the two important metrics. A hit is just any download of an object from the webserver (HTML, images, CSS files, JS files, flash....)

Chip-

greedy player

3:35 pm on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)



Add screening for image uploads, pay a team of people to go round removing all inappropriate content ( can take a while maybe year?) and then strip all url's offsite for images and bg images.

(makes your site crap)

Related: some sites have a homepage site that does not screen images and they have adsense!

IMPORTANT.

Having adsense on a domain that has porn, etc will get you banned too. so i guess you can't run adsense even on the mainpage.. or just do what some sites do, risk it?

[edited by: jatar_k at 10:06 pm (utc) on Sep. 3, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] no specific sites thanks [/edit]
[/edit][/1]

hyperkik

3:47 pm on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Have you looked into the AdSense API [code.google.com] (still in beta)?

In their words:

The AdSense API is ideal for developers whose users create their own web content through web hosting, web publishing, blogging, and social networking applications.

greedy player

4:04 pm on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)



Does that not give your users the access to creating an adsense account through your pages and put it on their blog for instance making you a share only right?

mike73

8:46 pm on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Write to Google and request review and permission. There's a chance that they may let you go considering the volume of traffic.

I think I'll do that. Thanks!

mike73

8:59 pm on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Do you mean hits or unique visitors? Quite a difference in the two.

318,000 unique visitors in August.

gamiziuk

9:05 pm on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Maybe try Chitika eMini Malls. That would be compatible with Adsense or Yahoo if your users put them on their pages. And you would not be violating any content TOS.

mike73

7:53 pm on Sep 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Does that not give your users the access to creating an adsense account through your pages and put it on their blog for instance making you a share only right?

That would be great. I don't see where is says anything about me getting a cut though.

mike73

8:02 pm on Sep 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Maybe try Chitika eMini Malls. That would be compatible with Adsense or Yahoo if your users put them on their pages. And you would not be violating any content TOS.

I cjecked them out, and I would really like to try it, but my site isn't in English :(

theRealairness

10:40 pm on Sep 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



318,000 unique visitors. That will surely earn you tons. And, live comfortably.

paul2yall

1:26 am on Sep 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



318,000 unique visitors. That will surely earn you tons. And, live comfortably.

That's a bit of an over-generalization. Let's not get anyone's hopes up too high. For a well-targeted site in a lucrative niche (like the ever-popular blue widgets), you may be right. But on a site featuring general-interest blogs, while it could generate a pretty decent income, I'm not sure anyone should expect to get rich from that kind of traffic.

swa66

3:02 am on Sep 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



If you have enough impressions to be a premium publisher you can negotiate not to have certain limitations.

Alioc

6:50 am on Sep 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



If you have enough impressions to be a premium publisher you can negotiate not to have certain limitations.

If you have enough impressions to be a premium publisher - IT'S usually already "enough"! lol

mike73

7:29 pm on Sep 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



That's a bit of an over-generalization. Let's not get anyone's hopes up too high. For a well-targeted site in a lucrative niche (like the ever-popular blue widgets), you may be right. But on a site featuring general-interest blogs, while it could generate a pretty decent income, I'm not sure anyone should expect to get rich from that kind of traffic.

What's driving me crazy is that if my site was in English and in the US, I could make bundles. Oddly, most of bloggers write about dogs and dog training, which was a pretty high-paying key word last time I checked.

But alas, my bloggers are scandinavian, and I don't get any of those ads :(

mike73

7:37 pm on Sep 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Back to my main question:

Do you think everyone would get pissed and leave if ads started appearing on their blogs?

netsubzero

9:55 pm on Sep 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi Mike73,

1) I think it's ok to put adsense in blogs, here's an article where Google explains how to optimize their ads for blogs

[google.com...]

2) I know this might sound funny, but the best way to see how much can you earn, and if your users would like or not the ads is just trying them, put some ads wait one week and see what happens, you can always go back and take away the ads if you're not earning what you expected or if you notice that your users are complaining or just leaving.

Good Luck

Car_Guy

10:17 pm on Sep 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



In the time that I've had AdSense ads on my site, nobody has ever mentioned them to me.

Well-targeted ads from ethical advertisers shouldn't bother reasonable people. (Don't like them? Don't look at that part of the page.)

There may be a few people who think you should be doing all you do for them for free. They can go somewhere else and hang out with their broke friends.

Filter out the junk. Keep checking for it.

incrediBILL

11:09 pm on Sep 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



If it's your server, then I think it's OK to monetize the whole thing, but I'd still consult with Google before moving forward.

However, if you don't want to send your bloggers running in a ticked off panic, offer to split the ad rotation with the bloggers AdSense account, showing the ads with a 40/60 split or something to give the bloggers an incentive to stay.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 11:09 pm (utc) on Sep. 3, 2006]

mike73

7:53 am on Sep 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hey guys, thanks for the great advice :)

zulu_dude

9:32 am on Sep 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I've just gone through a similar situation of changing a blog site from ad-free to displaying ads. So far, the ads have been on everyone's blogs for about 2 weeks and I haven't had a single complaint.

What I did was to slowly integrate the ads into the blog templates... first by just placing a text link to the homepage ('get your free blog here') and then by placing an image link to the homepage and then by replacing that with a paid ad and rotating it with ads for my own site. All that over the space of about a couple of months.

Something I have thought about doing and may implement in the future is enabling bloggers to remove the ads by paying a small monthly membership fee.

Alternatively, depending on your site's status in Scandinavia, you could sell ads direct, although that would be quite a lot more hassle than using AdSense! You could also try one of the CPM advertising programs, although I think it would be fairly difficult to get a blog hosting site accepted into the program.

mike73

8:45 pm on Sep 7, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



That's a great tip, zulu_dude. Thanks!