Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Is anybody else in this situation?
Our market is extremely high volume and low quality social networking traffic.
What kind of monthly page views are we talking about here?
10 mil, 50 mil, 100 mil, more?
Is the AdSense still running targeted or are the ads completely random?
Do you feel that AdSense may be trying to slowly extricate itself from mass market, lower quality traffic ala Web 2.0?
What do you feel about a niche Web 2.0 site with focussed visitors?
Just a thought.
Just because everybody uses AdSense doesn't mean everybody should, and it sounds like you're making the right decision.
What kind of monthly page views are we talking about here?10 mil, 50 mil, 100 mil, more?
Is the AdSense still running targeted or are the ads completely random?
Do you feel that AdSense may be trying to slowly extricate itself from mass market, lower quality traffic ala Web 2.0?
What do you feel about a niche Web 2.0 site with focussed visitors?
Interesting comments because these are all questions we've been pondering.
-We are currently serving over 50m page views a month.
-Sometimes the ads are targeted, but lately they've been off target a lot more often than in the past.
-We feel that AdSense is either intentionally extricating itself from this market or that the recent nose dive in earnings is a result of smart pricing correcting past over-performance in this market. In the end both work out the same for us.
-We have several more focused niche sites in development that would serve the same overall market, but with a more defined area of specific interest. We are using these sites to test the viability of more geo-focused, niche focused sites as opposed to the huge all traffic sites we have now.
When we first got into this market some time back, one of the first things I realized was that a large percentage of the revenue was coming from other sites in our market. This inbreeding of advertising can only work for so long. Sooner or later the revenue has to come from people outside of the market, not other people in the market trying to get a bigger market share. So this recent crash wasn't unexpected, it was just a matter of time. Hopefully tomorrow will bring a new wave of savvy advertisers that figure out a way to monetize this huge traffic market. Until then we'll just do the best we can.
What do you feel about a niche Web 2.0 site with focussed visitors?
I'm not WebPixie, but I'll comment:
There's no reason why a niche Web 2.0 site couldn't perform well for direct-response CPC advertisers, depending on the niche and reader motivation.
Example: Some of the Web 2.0 travel megasites (let's give them the collective name of "TripTourist") put a lot of emphasis on user-created hotel reviews, and most people who read hotel reviews are researching purchases. Such sites are likely to be better direct-response venues than, say, a Web 2.0 travel site that publishes literary travel essays, vacation diaries for members' families and friends, or photo galleries.
The upside is forced to cut back anything not making a real profit and set in motion new sites to spread risk.
Well we've done that too, so will many others and the endresult will be again stalemate.
The web is full now and imo there will now be a period of consolidation where some will get pissed off some will die and some will get bored. The web is still young and probably in slowly decreasing wave towards stability. Ergo Bust first big crash then came adsense and some upturn and more people on the web, but also many me too websites, now the thing the web is full and the mean old game of survival of the richest will start.
Somehow I am slightly optimistic that after this down period we will be slowly getting somewhere.
We've now switched to Adbrite and Tribal Fusion and are considering joining up with other networks. Heck, even Adbrite is outperforming Adsense -- by about 300% in the zone where its running! -- while our Adsense revenues from the entire site are down at least 65% from their 2007 average and there appears to be no hint of a rebound.
[edited by: CentennialEmpire at 7:53 am (utc) on Feb. 7, 2008]
What CPM are you getting through RMX, just out of curiosity?
We are in social networking related niche, so our ecpms are low compared to many others on here. Our Adsense ecpm for this channel (20m+ page impressions / mo) dropped by 3x in 2007. A small portion of this channle was exposed to RMX to monitor their ecpm, so when it dropped by 3x, and continued, we switched.
I am not sure if the rules of this forum allow me to quote exact numbers, but we went from higher than a dollar into the sub-dollar range, at which level RMX seems more reliable.
Since Yahoo bought RMX, it has about 8 different networks in it, which you can optionally disable (otherwise our inventory is split between them on an unknown to me basis). We seem to find that 2 of these networks give better ecpm in our niche (Remix Media (Right Media Network) and CPX Interactive).
