Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Combine AS with CMP ads
What is CMP?
Starting to brush off my arbitrage campaigns little by little. If I can rachet those up again I'll take the summer off.
ps. EFV, it is good to be back from the dark side.
I suspect that the problems that some publishers are experiencing with their Google revenues may be related to a very large increase in publishers and impressions combined with a reluctance on the part of many advertisers to participate in the content network.
Yep. As someone posted here a while back, how many of us haven't increased our content? Dilution is inevitable unless AdSense revenue growth outstrips the increase in publisher impressions. One doesn't need to be a math genius to understand that.
It took me a while to learn, for example, that Amazon links were useless on my site (because my readers are looking for free travel-planning information, not to buy books)
Thank you very much for saying that. It's suddenly clear why Amazon links don't work for my site either. People come to my site for free info too, and always have. I was just about to spend a lot of time on the Amazon thing again, but now I'm going to concentrate on what really works. (Lots and lots of content.)
And now that I think about it, that's probably why my product reviews do so poorly, too. They're some of my least viewed pages. My visitors are after the specific free content my site offers and those pages do the best for me.
Know your visitors. I really need to take a honest look at that.
1) You're confusing revenues with profits.
From the news story: "SAN FRANCISCO, April 19 (Reuters) - Google Inc. reported on Thursday its quarterly net profit rose 69 percent, topping expectations [...]"
Net profit is, er, net profit. At least where I grew up.
You may be right that this growth may not be accounted to Adsense (alone), and certainly is Adsense not the top contributor to Google profit (as discussed elsewhere in this forum), but to say I would be "confusing revenues with profit" is simply not true.
I am tired.
What a coincidence between Google's profits up and my earning drop: the time frame and the percentage!
Well, my profits climbed in the first quarter, and not by the same percentage. So I guess our different experiences cancel each other out. :-)
Dilution is inevitable unless AdSense revenue growth outstrips the increase in publisher impressions.
A clamp-down on MFA's by Google could possibly take millions of publisher impressions/per day off the charts.
A clamp-down on MFA's by Google could possibly take millions of publisher impressions/per day off the charts.
So could a traffic minimum, limiting publishers to one ad unit per page, restricting the types of content that can display AdSense ads, etc. That doesn't mean such minimums or restrictions should or will be implemented, however. For one thing, Google probably doesn't want to "take millions of publisher impressions per day off the charts," because it needs to serve ads for all of its advertisers, not just for the top bidders.
I may get in a little trouble for saying this, but...
Sell your own ads or links. I have easily been able to make as much selling my own ads on my site as what Google pays out. It's an entirely different sell, since I am selling individual pages or single links on single pages rather than run of site ads.
I started doing this when I realized that my average revenue per ad (not ad unit, individual ad, as in, a banner size has 2 ads, tall skyscraper, 4 ads) was 30 cents per year.
The calculation is simple, though rough. Take your annual earnings, then divide by (the number of pages you display, multiplied by the average # of ads on the page). The result is Average Annual Revenue Per Ad, or AARPA (don't sue me, you old geezers!).
Of course, some of your pages get much more traffic than others, so use your own judgement, but I decided to start at the bottom and work up.
Since I figured I could and probably should make 10 times that ridiculous 30 cents amount, I set out selling links on low traffic pages at X per link for a year (you figure it out). The advertisers thinks he/she is getting a bang-up deal, which, probably, they are and I get paid immediately for a 1 year contract, I've made a client contact which I can (and have) sold other options.
Now, I understand that Google may say I am violating their TOS and that's OK, and that I should be using no follow tags, and that's OK too, because, in the long run, if they would like to penalize webmasters who just want to make a living, eventually they'll run afoul of restraint of trade laws in the US (and maybe in the EU), besides raising the ire of webmasters, plus, they will likely become the target of a large amount of ridicule from ME.
Yes, I am pushing the envelope and taking some risk, but if you're unhappy with a situation, should you just stand there and take it or do something about it? I chose the latter and down the road I will have my own stable of advertisers and, who knows, I may still have AdSense on my site. I haven't replaced AS, just added my own ads.
My intention was not to hijack this thread, but I thought a full, open explanation of a possible solution was in order.
I also didn't want this post to be too long, but I need to say that AS is and always was somewhat of a crap-shoot. Some did better than others, but one thing remains. Real world publishers set their own rates and sell their own ads. Many of us glibly abrogated that responsibility to Google. I believe that publishing on the web is not that much different than print, thus, my decision to take back my responsibility to control the revenue-earning portion of my business. Those who have been in other publishing ventures may wish to take notice.
Sell your own ads or links
I'm not going to get into a discussion of selling text links (which is a topic for another day and another forum), but I will point out that there's nothing to keep an AdSense publisher from selling his or her own ads and running AdSense ads. It doesn't have to be either/or.
Average Annual Revenue Per Ad, or AARPA
Advanced Reports > Show data by Individual ad
Gives you that data for all single ads served inside your ad units.
As for selling text links, AdSense should not be affected or penalize you for it as long as they don't look like an ad unit, and who in her right mind would want to mimic that look anyway, though the search engine division of Google will be cracking down on those soon, but as said, that's another discussion.
Text links may be interpreted to look like Google's, in their words, mimic, which would be a TOS violation.
Link is link, I do sell links directly too but I do not have adSense on the same website.
So far it does works great for us and our advertisers. We will be switching our second largest website to our own ad links sometimes this week as we finally have enough direct advertisers for this website/market. I don’t have to be telling you how happy I’m about it :-)
