I've decided it's time to cut the cord temporarily, maybe permanently.
The ads are a detriment to the site and negatively impact the user experience.
Going to see how removal impacts the site, and maybe consider a partial AdSense play again in the near future depending on how other monetization concepts pan out.
wyweb
6:00 pm on Mar 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
@Scurramunga
what I do know is that right now Adsense is not worth the effort.
Hell, there wasn't any effort. That was the attraction. Clear a space on your page, throw some code in and you were making money 5 minutes later.
I guess it depends on how much money you were making. I did pretty well. Adsense paid for everything at one point. Now they just send me rocks in the mail.
wyweb
6:13 pm on Mar 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
@puckparches
How you know what ads are shown to your users?
You don't.
And in fact Bill himself jumped on this one time. I remember the thread well. It was about Competitive Ad Filter and especially about geo targeting.
You might not even be seeing the same ads your visitors see. You could be seeing an entirely different set.
I wish I could find that thread....
Freedom
6:44 pm on Mar 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
Incredibill has a point in all of this and judging by the thread titles on this adsense forum lately the mood is running very negative, probably the most negative I've ever seen. Circumstances lately with both Panda and now a serious drop in eCPM have me looking at my secondary advertising network with more placement and hope than I've ever had before. At this point, I'm looking for stability more than the big paycheck and this other network has been giving me that more than adsense.
Broadway
4:36 am on Mar 16, 2011 (gmt 0)
In regards to: >>The ads are a detriment to the site and negatively impact the user experience.<<
I use adsense and did quite a bit of A/B testing involving ad placement and number of above-the-fold ads.
I found a pronounced direct correlation between prominence of ads and bounce rate.
Me personally, I'd rather have a little more traffic and better stats than a little more income. If not already, there has to be a time when Google factors in bounce rate with the SERP ranking calculations.
Lexur
7:37 am on Mar 16, 2011 (gmt 0)
The last summer I've started a few websites from scratch where Google bot is banned in robots.txt and ads come from other ad networks than Adsense and I can't believe how hard is to make a cent outside the Google atmosphere.
I remember there was once upon a time when Yahoo! and Altavista were the kings and making websites was simply fun but I feel that I would need 96 hours a day just for work if Google and Adsense dissapear.
Worst part of this history it's I think that's slowly happening; milestone after milestone.
Tashi
7:42 am on Mar 16, 2011 (gmt 0)
@Broadway: Of course there's a correlation between ad prominence and bounce rate, the more people click on your ads, the higher your bounce rate.
