Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Our-Hometown and WiFinder are the two latest additions. They were adding sometime in the past few weeks.
Our-Hometown states they earned $6000 in the first month, while WiFinder earned at least enough to cover the wages for a new employee.
Both studies are really promoting the aspect of how easy it is to cut and paste the code into webpages, 45 minutes for one, and 20 minutes for the other, to have AdSense running on the sites.
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[edited by: Jenstar at 11:14 pm (utc) on Oct. 23, 2003]
Our-Hometown states they earned $6000 in the first month
It actually says that Our-Hometown papers (45 different ones) earned $6,000 in the first month. That's only $133 per newspaper website, or a little more than $4/day which seems like a pittance to me. Our-Hometown does represent mostly small communities.
I have suspected that newspapers don't do very well with AdSense since we see so many PSAs. In fact, my local paper stopped running AdSense a couple of weeks ago. My city is among the top 10 U.S. cities.
I'm surprised that Google has used this case study because in my view, it doesn't speak very highly of the earnings potential.
they state that the AdSense program has 150,000 publishers.
Actually Advertisers, not Publishers, but I don't think that's an accurate statement by Google because not all AdWords Advertisers participate in AdSense.
[edited by: Blue_Fin at 11:03 pm (utc) on Oct. 23, 2003]
As for the earnings per newspaper, that is correct. But also factor in that it is Google PR writing this release. Most people see the $6000 and go "wow, I could make $6G a month, lets go sign up right now", which is how Google wants people to read it. Few people would stop and think about the actual math and see it is only $4 per day per newspaper.
While newspaper sites show a lot of PSAs, Google learned early with some negative publicity about very poorly targeted ads on news sites. So they would rather play save and over-serve PSAs on questionable stories than find inappropriate ads on stories about murders or house fires.
Rich
My site ads about 300 pages a day to it, google displays ads general to my theme, then crawls the page and displays more targetted ones. PSA's are due to negative keywords more then anything else.
I don't doubt that's your experience, but I don't think that's the case with newspaper websites. After all, there really is no general theme to them.
What types of words are triggering the psa's?
They encourage feedback and providing info. like this helps everyone. They want to serve paying ads just as much as you want to see paying ads on your site, as long as your page content isn't triggering something that violates their policies.
That does not surprise me, given the quality of news reporting generally, in the UK, the national press can’t get it right, even 50% of the time so what chance do local press stand?
The real reasons why AdSense/Adwords ads don't work well with newspapers have nothing to do with the quality of news reporting:
1) As others have pointed out, the constant addition of new articles makes it difficult for Google to provide targeted ads in newspapers.
2) Just as important, the audience for ads in newspapers is targeted by locality--not by reader interests. Let's say a newspaper has an article on cruising. A reader who looks at that article is less likely to be a cruise prospect than the reader of a Web site about cruising or cruise destinations.
3) Local targeting means limited competition and low bids, except possibly in the largest metropolitan areas.
I'm a bit paranoid about writing google.. but I did read drugs is a negative word.. would anyone know if this has to do with prescription words? I see some prescription sites that have targetted ads so I'm confused as to why some do and some get psas...
Thanks.
In this forum has been wrote many times that one of the main adavantages of Adsense is the easy implementation and the lack of advertising management costs. Don't forget, by the way, that these 6000$ is only on the first month; in my own experience the will at least double (or even much better) this amount in the next months.
I'm a bit paranoid about writing google.. but I did read drugs is a negative word.. would anyone know if this has to do with prescription words? I see some prescription sites that have targetted ads so I'm confused as to why some do and some get psas...
Why are you paranoid about asking Google? If you were running an advertising program that wasn't working (as in you were Google), wouldn't you want to know about it so that you would have the opportunity to try to fix it? Google has as much and possibly even more to gain by correcting problems that cause paying ads not to display.
Without seeing the pages with the PSAs, we can only guess. Google, however, has the benefit of known problems that we may not be aware of.
Blue_Fin said that seems like a "pittance".
Pricing, publicly available on the Our-Hometown.com site, states that it charges $62.50 per week ($8.93 per day) for the first newspaper and $37.50 per week ($5.35 per day) for subsequent newspapers (many small newspapers are often owned by one publishing company). The system requires the newspaper to only expend a small amount of labor to ftp the Quark, Adobe Indesign/Pagemaker, etc. files they use to print the paper "As is". No cutting and pasting, special tagging, html conversion or any other labor/training is required.
When the the $4.44 per day in Google AdSense revenues is compaired to the $5.35 to $8.93 per day in costs, the picture is a little clearer. Remember that these are small weekly community newspapers.
The papers also make money by upselling print display ads to the web, orders for print subscriptions and classified ads are taken online and some papers are selling online subscriptions to the "current" online news (archive are always free).
Blue_fin also mentions that "constant adding of articles on newspaper websites accounts for more PSAs". Our-Hometown.com adds about 400 new stories per day and it is true that it can take a few days in many cases for AdSense to start to deliver paying ads on these new stories. However, the majority of AdSense revenues are generated on the 200,000+ stories in the archives and not on the current news.
