What's the Story behind all those unrelated Adsense Ads?

[Multiverse]

I have been away from the whole publisher thing for a few years. Have been selling products. Spent a couple of millions on Adwords. So I know both sides of the fence pretty well now.

Lately I started a new content website about "widgets". A topic that you pay around $2 per click on adwords. I did a real investment into this. Having it developed over 6 months. The site took off quite nicely. Has about 100000 visitors a month already. It get's a lot of praise and I believe it has the potential to become a major player.

So I thought to myself: Time to monetize my new baby. Slapped on some Adsense ads and was expecting to make money.

Yeah right. As it turns out, Adsense makes me about $5 a day!

Can you see me scratching my head? How can a site that every day thousands of people use to look for "widgets" make only $150 a month in ad revenue?

Looking at the ads it's quite obvious. The ads are non-related, cheap "Are you single?", "Free file sharing" and alike. At least in the languages I can read. I tried from a couple of computers from around the world.

Ok, so:

a) People go to Google, look for "widgets", see a WALL of $2-per-click ads for "widgets".

b) People go to my "which widgets to buy" site and see "Windows Vista Driver Download" and "Google Business Email" ads which have almost nothing to do with "widgets" and pay only $0.2 per click.

Why?

Looking around the net this seems to be the way it is everywhere now. Whatever I google, the system in place seems to be the same: The search results are filled with relevant ads. But the ads on the content pages are completely irrelevant. What's the story behind this?

[onlineleben]

Maybe helpful to channel your visitors better and offer them the ads (adsense and/or amazon) is this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

It is from 2006 but I refer to it quite often

[netmeg]

Did you get much resistance from advertisers because of that?

Not so far.

[Multiverse]

I did it, with Gravity Forms and a payment gateway. Was surprisingly easy, once I decided not to implement geo-targeting right away, just to get started. Now that it's up and working, I can work on that next.

You replaced Adsense with self-service ads on your pages? Interesting. How much traffic do you have?

The "Find this product on Amazon" currently sends about 300 users to Amazon every day. Is that enough for direct ad sales? The USA portion of the traffic would be about 100 users who click through to the advertiser per day.

[netmeg]

I didn't replace AdSense, I augmented AdSense. AdSense is still the primary income source, but I'm getting more direct ads every year (and the ones I'm getting tend to come back) It also doesn't hurt that one of my main sources for advertisers aren't allowed to advertise in AdWords. And I'm a lot cheaper and more targeted than billboards.

I have a ton of traffic, but it's very seasonal. And I have multiple sites covering different seasons.

For direct sales, it's all about how much traffic you send. If you have 300 users a day with a credit cards in hand, I'm pretty sure someone would be interested in that.

It's definitely a lot more work, and so far it doesn't come close to AdSense for revenue, but I'm building it up because unlike AdSense, it's something I can control. Trying to have as few single point of failure as possible.

I put it off way too long because I had this thought it would be complicated, and then I just decided to make it really simple (and really cheap) just to see if I could generate any interest. A few people signed up right away. The next year I doubled my rates, and the same people signed up again without a word of complaint (plus a few more) and then I figured I was on to something. Now I just gotta refine it, and put the word out to the right people.

[Multiverse]

If you have 300 users a day with a credit cards in hand, I'm pretty sure someone would be interested in that.

I have several thousand users a day who click through to specific widgets. 300 of them click on the "Find this product on Amazon" link.

Do your direct advertisers pay per Click, CPM or Month? What kind of link do they get for their money? Does it carry SEO value?

[netmeg]

1. per month; 2. a 300x250 or 160x600 non-exclusive banner (i.e. they rotate with other advertisers) 3. No, all links are no-followed. I'm not a total idiot.