Forum Moderators: martinibuster
It's perhaps of interest to those who are forever asking "How much can I make with Adsense?"
One of the sites mentioned in the story says they take in between $15,000 - 18,000 per month from Adsense and goes on to say current traffic levels are around 1.3 million uniques per month.
If you take a look at the site mentioned you'll see their Adsense implementation is pretty minimal -- admittedly in your face, but, as far as I've seen, just a single block per page.
(edit: correction, some pages have multiple Adsense ad-blocks)
Should we invite him over here to discuss his site?
I wonder whether the response would be positive, defensive, a claim of innocence, etc.?
FarmBoy
Seriously, If I were him, I will not disclose my earning and web site topic to the world
"Fair Use" only goes so far. "Educational Purposes" has limitations. To blatantly profit off other people's work is a no-no. His creative disclaimers notwithstanding.
nyone want to predict whether this site will(1) Still be indexed by Google
(2) Still display AdSense adsone month from now?
If he doesn't update his whois information, he probably won't even own the domain name in one month, now that the spotlight has been put on it from the WSJ article.
[adsense.blogspot.com...]
This tied with the fact that there is far far worse crap out there makes penalization pretty unlikely1.
1That is until the good folks at webby world get their panties in a twist.
it would appear at least someone at google is well aware of his site
I dont know what percentage of revenue goes to publishers, but I'm guessing it's small
Nope. See Google's quarterly earnings reports.
A surface examination is probably all he got.
It's hard to imagine that Google would endorse a site that is using dubious tactics like this. Surely they would have a good look at it before commenting.
If what he is doing is acceptable then I wouldn't mind a piece of the action. How would we find out?
Greed? lol - since when is there an issue with making money here.
If what he is doing is acceptable then I wouldn't mind a piece of the action. How would we find out?
The copyright is an issue against their policy -
Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.
One interesting technique he uses in his source is an image map with overloading of links on the same area. He has several links on one of his image maps, all with the same x,y coordinates. A browser will certainly only pick one of them, so the user is always directed to the same page, but the bots are dumb enough to think that all those links are legitimate.
The author probably excpected a review of his site after the article in the WSJ because he has commented out the links to his national ZIP code spider food and webhosting links directories. It would have been better if he had commented them out server side, because with these HTML comments we can still see his daily tactics :)
It has been asked some posts before, but I also wonder what the SE ranks and AdSense earnings in about one month time will be.
According to Quantcast, the free third party source I use for looking at the traffic of OTHER sites, his monthly page views are 765,710 (Nov 2007), which is ballpark half the amount the article quotes.
That puts an entirely new spin on the claims. If one claim is embellished, then maybe the other is as well. Although, it makes the income numbers seem easier to swallow. Doing the math, I can verify that I would be making that amount (gross) myself, with that level (765,710) of traffic.
I find when compared to statistics used by webmasters for their own sites, the Quantcast numbers are pretty accurate. I have checked dozens of sites on Quantcast in various nitches against webmasters' inhouse statistics and they match up pretty close.
I do that in 2 days.
I'll try to get a little further off topic in my next post....
The claims that the site made regarding their income didn't strike me as particularly unrealistic given the stated traffic. Though, given some of the posts above, it would be great to see the stats broken out between the "original" content that he has written, Vs that which has been "gathered", and the respective earnings of each section... dream on.
My guess would be that the site started off legit, then once monetising it with Adsense began, the owner thought, "wow I could make a lot more with this" and so comes the zip code pages and pilfered content. It's probably not an uncommon slippery slope that some sites find themselves on....
... or maybe he just made it all up!
It seems to me the focus is American websites targeting American visitors. The company we are looking at is also American, as are all mine and those I watch.
It is also pretty much accepted, as stated above, that sites with heavier traffic are more accurate in these third party traffic evaluators.
It was just a thought.
(of course there's a lot of ways to manipulate actual traffic tho)
Plus, if (again per the WSJ) "The vast majority of publishers make less than $10 or $20 a month " then think of all the accounts that Google gets to sit on because they haven't reached their $100 target.
From the article:
Blog publishers could certainly use the help in making money. The vast majority of publishers make less than $10 or $20 a month through advertising, according to Internet-advertising experts.
It's difficult to tell whether the article means publishers in general or blogger publishers are earning the $10 or $20 a month.
Or for that matter, whether the "Internet-advertising experts" know what they are talking about.
Or whether the "Internet-advertising experts" do know what they are talking about but the author confused the issue.
FarmBoy
[edited by: Jane_Doe at 5:37 am (utc) on Jan. 17, 2008]
I always find it odd that the WSJ and other major publications often seem to accept at face value whatever income people tell them they make from Adsense or other businesses, frequently without noting that the reporters actually took the time to verify the income.
Yep. And then others quote the figure as the gospel truth. "I read it in an article, it must be true"
FarmBoy
