Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Many (most) of the computer experts doing adsense are running MFA sites or arbitrage.
I like having a reasonable income from adsense and yet have 16 hours a day to do my real job.
Google can use the ad space far better.
For example I visit a fair and make a photo from a company working only regional.
The page with the photo is good ranked for a general search term around the widget on the photo.
There are about 92 Million people speaking German, but only maybe 2 million in the range where this company works.
So when he would pay me personal for an ad on this page, only 1 of 46 visitors would be in the range of his company.
He has nothing from a visitor several hundred kms away.
But AdWords has the geographic targeted options. An AdWords client can target "search term" and 50km distance around his location.
Nothing but a bunch of thieves, these Googlers.
They look at your site and promptly blacklist it from their Adwords account on the basis that you're not the great match they thought they were getting with Adsense.
This may start happening regardless. Especially now that some advertisers can see which sites they're ads are displayed on, and even more so when site-targeted contextual ads begin.
Trying to manage that would be work, though.
Google obviously isnt robbing me, or you! The nature of bidding and the amount of advertisers in each niche as well as the quality of your site and traffic is becoming more and more important as time goes on.
The algos get improved, better for determining what pays the advertiser due to traffic quality, the tools available to advertisers gets improved, and getting rid of adwords adsense arbitrage simply means an unneeded extra layer is removed and isnt taking a cut out of the advertisers revenue.
This means more is left for the good publishers (and google). It also means the advertisers that turned off the content network will in time have the confidence to return. Its these guys that put ALL the money into the system - arbitrage sites simply take some out - So income and advertisers bid prices should improve even on areas where there currently does not seem to be enough inventory.
The point is that just because you are seeing revenue drop it does not apply across the board. In fact many of us are seeing the exact opposite! I am seeing both across a bunch of sites and the ones that deserve to be earning more now are! And the ones that dont now are not!
[edited by: Genuine1 at 1:48 pm (utc) on June 26, 2007]
It's the end of the quarter and Google is surely taking 70% or more from most ads right now.
The logical way to avoid problems with your adsense account would be to bypass google and go direct to the clients. Why don't more people simply follow this path if they have quality sites?
Many publishers do sell ads directly to advertisers (either on their own or with rep firms), but that doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't run AdSense ads, too.
Remember AdSense ads are--for the most part--contextual ads from many different advertisers (including small advertisers) that are targeted to the topic of a page. Selling and distributing such ads requires the services of a middleman (in this case, Google) that can aggregate impressions or clicks across many different sites while attracting advertisers--including mom-and-pop businesses--that wouldn't be cost-effective to reach with direct sales.
If you look at big media sites like Nytimes.com, you'll see that they often run run-of-site or run-of-section display ads and AdSense contextual text ads, because the two types of advertising complement each other nicely.
1) You need your own ad platform to serve ads. Not sure how much it'd cost, but my guess is that something like DART is not cheap.
2) You need to sell your own ad space. As people pointed out, it could be a full-time job.
3) Most agencies and/or large advertisers will not even talk to you unless you have something like 10 million impressions per month. If you're under that, you are far too small for them to bother buying anything from you directly.
Those are the main reasons, in my opinion.
Are you going to sell ads by clicks, impressions, or a straight fee? If it's by clicks or impressions, whose software are you going to use to track that (and will your advertisers approve of that software)?
Are you going to have multiple advertisers sharing the same ad space? How are you going to rotate that and keep them all happy?
Will the ads be served to your web page by the advertiser or served from your site? Will you have prior approval for the ads or can they change at any time?
When I visit a fair and tell somebody "internet promotion", he will tell me, that he has a total perfect web site and does not need my service.
When I visit a fair and start making photos, he will ask me for what magazine I work and will work great with me together, that I can make great pages about his product and with Google ads from all his competitors. Sure, when somebody clicks on "contact" he will also see his address.
Some friends asked me, why I do not try to negotiate about direct ads on this pages. Again, the answer is simple.
Every good newspaper has the journalists seperated from the department selling advertising. So You can approach the person as a journalist or as a salesman for advertising. Both in one person is strange and not ususl.
So I approach the person as a journalist. My ad selling department is Google.
The reason people don't do what you suggest is that it can be a full time job to get and maintain advertisers. Many folks using adsense are not computer experts and have a 'real job' to do.
You can simple post a link "ADVERTISE HERE" which has worked for my site for 10 years.
Companies like AdBrite supply all the code and backend facilities for a mere 25% of your total.
However, I wrote my own and take 97% after the credit card fees.
You also have to send invoices, process remittances, and figure out how to handle those situations where they don't pay or take forever to send the check.
That's not true at all as you can have them auto-billed for recurring ads automatically even using Paypal, it's all quite trivial.
Besides, who cares how long the check takes?
You only run ads a) after the check arrives and b) after the check clears the bank unless you accept checks online. I don't accept checks because checks are work and people in business that don't even have a credit card probably can't clear a check in the first place.
My ad selling department is Google
Google supplements by direct sales of ads and supplies diversity for my visitors but they aren't a replacement. I've run a 3 month campaign for a very large vendor for $10K/month and that was just ONE ad placement, and a $1/CPC 3 month product lead campaign for another vendor, paid out about the same, so on and so forth.
I finally dumped the big vendors and haven't done them in a couple of years because they were a total pain wanting all sorts of nonsense like like specific demographic targeting narrower than by country, which I won't even attempt for $30K, not worth my time.
However, focusing on the small advertisers was perfect. I have 5 non-rotating text ads per section/category, $50 minimum per advertiser per spot. When you total up all the sections and now my new per location ads (country, state, etc.) there's a substantial total of $$$,$$$.00 in ad space and it's at least half full. ;)
Many of my smaller advertisers claim I send them the bulk of their traffic so not advertising on my site is akin to getting dropped in Google for the organic traffic crowd.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 7:33 pm (utc) on June 26, 2007]
