Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I am glad that they are so rich, because I am now wealthier than before. When I first joined Adsense, I earned only a few cents per day for two years. I was so discouraged back then. But I didn't give up. I continue to create at least one content per day. Now, I am earning an average of $2 per day per website and I have 10 websites. The secret is very simple. You need more traffic to your website in order to make more money. How to get more traffic? You need more content.
My income from Adsense will not put me in Forbes' list of 400 richest Adsensers nor will it helps me to buy a Ferrari but it helps me to buy good meals every day.
I hope you guys will not give up on Adsense.
The question is not if business is generally risky, but if Adsense is a viable strategy on its own? And it isn't.
Relying on a single source of advertising isn't the most stable strategy and I don't follow it, but it's a valid one. And trying to impose a pointless and self-aggrandizing definition of yourself as a "professional" and others as "hobbyists" doesn't change that.
As long as the Googlecantdowrong fans tell them it's all pure gold dust, they will be around.
No. As long as they continue making money, they will be around. Only the smallest percentage of them ever make it here were we Googlecantdowrong fans can feed them the grape koolaid.
Reality check: It obviously IS, since so many people make very successful livings with it.
A strategy that is unstable doesn't win in evolution nor in economy.
And trying to impose a pointless and self-aggrandizing definition of yourself as a "professional" and others as "hobbyists" doesn't change that.
[webmasterworld.com...]
As long as the Googlecantdowrong fans tell them it's all pure gold dust, they will be around..
I don't think anyone here has ever said that AdSense is pure gold dust. It obviously isn't, because it's an auction-based system where prices and earnings fluctuate from day to day, and where the low barrier to entry means that there's always the risk of supply (ad inventory) outstripping demand and therefore pushing prices down. Think about it: More publishers + more pages per publisher = A lot more pages competing for readers, ads, and clicks.
Just as important, advertisers now have more control over where their ads run than they've had in the past, and that's bound to result in lower earnings for publishers whose traffic doesn't convert or who are unappealing to advertisers for other reasons. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is likely to widen when site-targeted contextual ads become available.
AdSense isn't a Gold Rush creek filled with nuggets, and publishing isn't an easy way to make a living.
if you're building a business, you have to plan for the future. You simply can not have the volatility,
As a business owner, you plan the best you can, hedge your bets, and develop alternative revenue streams to protect you as much as possible from downturns. As has been mentioned, relying 100% on AdSense is an extremely risky proposition. Just like relying 100% on any one revenue stream in any other field is extremely risky.
relying 100% on AdSense is an extremely risky proposition. Just like relying 100% on any one revenue stream in any other field is extremely risky.
That depends on how much you make with Adsense and how much you put in savings. If you make just enough to live off, it's very different from if you make 100 times that each month.
If you had to rely on one internet company, there aren't many better than Google. It may in fact be the least risky internet business on which to base your income.
Investors made the leaders very wealthy, not Adsense. I think they may have overvalued stock, but the long-term success of Adsense isn't closely tied to the company's stock market value.
I don't see a market correction causing Google to go bankrupt (thereby knocking out Adsense). There's a lot more diversification in Google's portfolio than when it first went public, too.
Competition is not currently a big threat to Google. YPN continues to struggle and MSN is nothing to get excited about. There are few indications this will ever change.
Experts predict increased online advertising in the future. There aren't many known alternatives to Adsense which are more effective.
For some folks the best thing to do is rely 100% on Adsense until it gets them enough to not have to rely on Adsense at all.
p/g
I know of very few businesses that do NOT have volatility and unknowns. (Any that do have that appearance attract lots of other stable-minded people, disrupting the status quo and introducing the volatility that had been previously missing.)
Here's the difference in my opinion. Let's say you're running a store. One month, your sales are off by 50%. What are you going to do? First, you're probably going to analyze the sales. Did fewer people come in? If so, why? Did they buy less? Again - if so, why? What did they buy before and what are they buying now?
Now, enter AdSense. Your "sales" (ad revenue) is 50% off. In this situation, you are invited to make a business decision, except Google will
- NOT tell you what people clicked on
- NOT tell you if it's the clicks that performed worse or they simply decided to give you less money per click
- NOT tell you which advertisers are performing for you and which aren't
Let's also add that you don't even control what you stock on your shelves - Google does. You can make a request for what should NOT be in your store, but no more than 200 requests, please. What kind of store is that where you're supposed to stand all day selling who-knows-what for who-knows-how-much, with no cash register, where at the end of the day a big friendly fellow comes in and tells you "congratulations, you made this much"? Would you open a store under such terms?
To use another metaphor, it sure can be tough driving in heavy traffic with crazy drivers all around you. But it's a whole lot more difficult to drive around blindfolded.
But many people tend to find that the non-Google suppliers give even worse results, so they'll stick with or go back to Google.
Additionally, the smart store owner will be constantly expanding his store (i.e., adding new content and/or additional sites) to bring in more potential buyers and more inventory.
BTW, the lack of details that you pointed out is exactly the situation that many store owners worked under before the advent of computers that allowed real-time investory and sales tracking and advanced demographic matching. Sure, they could see overall trends ("Hmm, I usually have to re-order blue widgets 3 times as often as red widgets, but I don't know which of my customers buy red widgets and who buys blue widgets."), but ceertainly not the detailed stats that are available now. Yet they continued on and built up their businesses without perfect information.
[edited by: LifeinAsia at 6:13 pm (utc) on Sep. 25, 2007]
To use another metaphor, it sure can be tough driving in heavy traffic with crazy drivers all around you. But it's a whole lot more difficult to drive around blindfolded.
You can always sell ads direct or hire a rep firm. You'll still have ups and downs, though. That's just the nature of the publishing business.
Hmmmm... one of my previous ventures:
lawncare- hard @@#$ work + chasing money from clients and someone always undercuting you = instability.
If google punted me tomorrow, I'd have to say it was a 4 year success.
These folks will pay you some lip service about the notion that AdSense is not something around which you can build a sound business plan just before they take a break to go to their hotel room to check their latest AdSense stats.
My own view is that it can and should play a significant role as part of any revenue generating internet marketing business plan, and, if done right, can produce a very nice income stream. Building traffic from diverse sites and sources is one way of injecting some reliability into AdSense.
I really hadn't thought of AdSense as primarily a revenue enhancement for hobbyist publishers.
If AdSense is anything like affiliate marketing, its publisher/revenue distribution is like a pyramid with an extremely wide base. (I can remember getting to the next-to-highest "Network Earnings" tier at Commission Junction when I reached a few hundred bucks per month.)
They probably receive a nice rate of return on those funds during the holding period, wouldn't you think?
I doubt if the float amounts to much in the overall scheme of things (at today's interest rates, anyway). Still, every little bit counts, especially with a steadily shrinking dollar.
that's my conclusion too.
Oh yeah right, that interest on sub-$100 amounts really adds up. That must come to as much as several thousand dollars every single month. No wonder they're worth $175 billion.
And I do mean few. Let's assume 10,000 AdSense publishers with an average of $50/month- that's $500,000 that can generate interest. At 5% (extremely generous these days, considering the recent Fed cut), that's about $2,083. (Of course, that's assuming the entire amount sat in the bank for the entire month which doesn't happen- it gets built up over the month, but we'll still use that as the high end.) That probably doesn't even cover the salary for the lowest paid Googlite.
How does Google advertise it's service?
Go to [google.com...]
a Dog naming service..
Then a Gardening tips service.
:/
Adsense Blog
"However, please know that once you've received your payments, you're still welcome to use them however you wish - whether it's donating them to a charity, paying your hosting bills, or treating yourself to a night out on the town."
Doesn't mention the Bahamas .. but comparatively low expenditures.
This means to me that most will not earn a lot, hence the writer mentioned the most likely scenario for the average publisher, low income expenditures.
I think Google Adsense wants two different publishers, either mega successful ones or the masses of honest hobbyists, that also make the back links work.
Matt: Obviously we don't know the true number, but I don't see how reasonable assumptions can lead to any more than an infinitesimal benefit to Google.
Matt: Obviously we don't know the true number, but I don't see how reasonable assumptions can lead to any more than an infinitesimal benefit to Google.
Yapp totally agree ..
Although a friend of mine gets his German emails from Ireland, kinda hinting that they also outsource to low income countries, so I guess there are loads of low paid Googlers. Maybe we have to redefine what a Googler is. Only the elite programmers or also the non - technical staff? ;)
Big advertisers, fortune 500s etc.,Finniacal, Banks,insurance companies, credit
cards, medical, info merchants, hobbist,EBay types, Blogs, Gov, etc,etc,etc.
Has any one ever seen a study done on this. Probably Google, Yahoo or MSN must
have done some analyzation of web sites. Maybe ICANN has some numbers.
Anyway an interesting thought!...KF
The availability of an English-speaking workforce probably doesn't hurt, either.
Fine for the English speaking countries, but I have yet to hear about the large indigenous German population in Ireland .. :D
Sounds more like the cheapo call centre jobs they set up in Scotland and Ireland. These are underpaid jobs for students (I worked in one here as a student) or sometimes they ship them in.
All I am trying to point out is that the cheapest paid Googler will likely be pretty low paid, like in any other multinational.
Well still nothing compared to my local broadband provider, 2 hours wait and then some guy on the other side of the planet has to take the rap ..
If you could classify and quantify the million and millions of web sites out there(probably no way!} I wonder how it would shake down percentage wise?
Some numbers as I found them:
A recent Verisign report has about 135.000.000 million registered domain names.
of these are 65% live websites 25% parked and 10% have no websites at all.
Then they have a PPC - intent website report. About 1/7 are registered to generate PPC ad revenue.
So we have about 87.750.000 live websites and a world internet usage (worldinternetstats) of about 1.17 billion, a 17% penetration with the biggest percentage of users in Asia, but only with 11.8 %.
Now total number of companies. I found 4.5m in 2007 in the UK according to the FT with 37,600,000 UK users at 62.3 % penetration.
of these are according to a SULC 2002 report (assuming no major statistic shift in the last 5 years):
UK company size
number of employees
0 = 69.3% equates to 3.118.500 companies
1-49 = 29.8% equates to 1.341.000 "
50-249 = 0.7% equates to 31.500
250+ = 0.2% equates to 9.000
Now since we are in the publishing industry prospects.ac.uk states
that there are 2,500 companies in the UK that publish consumer and business directories, 9,000 magazine titles, which have a total value of more than £6 billion, 20 national newspapers (daily and Sunday) and over 1,300 local daily and weekly newspapers. Over 600 newspapers and dozens of press agencies report online and Public and not-for-profit publishing, there are opportunities outside ‘commercial’ publishing with statutory and voluntary organisations publishing information. It is not possible to gauge the size of this sector but it is significant.
As we can assume most of these have somehow web sites these days, besides the most obscure maybe, you have the numbers but now we arrive at the age old problem of what is quality?
Maybe you could attribute spending power to overall quality in numbers. Doesn't mean one person can publish 10 good pages, but the FT will probably beat you hands down. If you have the "national Inquirer Type magazines", they still will be quality to their readers, so let's assume in a model money makes quality.
So you have maybe 10.000 20.000 halfway decent publishers in the UK out there, compared to 37.000.000 users that can theoretically litter up bebo, myspace and facebook.
Netcraft states:
The high growth so far this year has been largely driven by the increasing number of online blogging and social networking communities. This month sees strong growth in the number of sites at Windows Live Spaces, MySpace, and Blogger appearing in the survey.
Increase of about 15.000.000 million websites worldwide in 3 months.
So the biggest growth is now in personal and given what I have seen, low quality, publishing.
So I can't see really any reason, why adsense et. al. shouldn't now target those, to continue growing and it will be more of a hobby market type of thing, as they did with adsense inclusion into blogger.
By far perfect stats, but at least some.
So I can't see really any reason, why adsense et. al. shouldn't now target those
I don't think AdSense is "targeting" any kind of site. It's like Coca-Cola or gasoline: It's a product for everyone, from multinational megapublishers to 18-year-old students who use their AdSense income for beer money.
Those Verisign numbers are interesting, by the way. Thanks for posting them.
Totally Awesome! First time I have seen some of those numbers! Thanks...KF
Totally Awesome! First time I have seen some of those numbers! Thanks...KF
I think the message is "learn Mandarin ..." :D
