September 22, 2003
Making Sense of AdSense
Google's AdSense program is fantastic, a category killer. A good way to make money, a tasteful way to do ads, and a dramatic new way to turn hobbyist or personal websites into a more-than-break-even source of revenue.
Nick Denton, no stranger to the attempt to make a profitable blog, has even predicted AdSense will have an impact on site design, though of course he was characteristically cynical about his own prediction just two days later. Still, I agree with Jason Shellen's assertion: smart use of AdSense placement will probably outperform most current banner-based systems.
But there's a few critical problems. First, only some categories of content will truly benefit from these ads. Matt Haughey's PVRblog has been quite succesful, in terms of PageRank, traffic, and ad dollars. But part of the reason for that last success is that the cost per click on Tivo-related keywords is extraordinarily high. Some quick-and-dirty cost calculations on the phrase "Tivo upgrade" as an AdWords ad shows the cost per click to be about $4.50. The word "Tivo" alone is worth almost $3 a click, and generates 250 click-throughs per day. With PVRblog showing up near the top of a lot of Tivo accessory-related searches, the site is bound to get a nice piece of those click-through pennies.
Most topics aren't so lucrative, though. You could work backwards, querying for the most valuable search terms and building sites around them. Web hosting is a perennial text ad favorite, with the word "hosting" bidding at up to $15 a click and Google's tools predicting 2400 clicks per day. That's more than $35,000 in ad revenue generated by one keyword every day. Great sites, and great weblogs in particular, aren't typically created by designing around a particular keyword, of course. So you have to write what you know, what you're passionate about. And if you happen to like Jai Alai instead of hosting, you're only getting a dime per click.
There's a far more serious problem with AdSense, though. The approval system is capricious, even arbitrary. It's understandable that Google wants to make sure sites aren't just ad farms, and it's in everyone's interest that quality be maintained, ideally by human verifiers. Nobody wants to see those sad Red Cross PSAs that take the place of house ads on poorly-indexed sites.
The human verification process at Google, though, is uncharacteristically opaque. I'd assume they factor in the ads which would run on a site before approving or denying an application, and if I take a look at my site's potential ads, I see some of value. Ads specifically targeted to weblog software, Manhattan computer repair, New York hotels. These all seem relevant and valuable to me, but I've been repeatedly rejected.
It's not just sour grapes on my part. Take NYC Eats, a great little niche weblog. Aaron's brilliant little AdSense senser shows some potentially lucrative ads, which makes sense since the letters "NYC" by themselves cost two dollars a click. But no AdSense approval there. The problem is the wording in the program policies:
In general, we do not accept personal pages, chat sites, or blogs into the AdSense program. However, if a site contains targeted, text-based content and/or provides a product or service, we may consider it for participation.
But Puzzleblog (formerly Scrabblog) is a personal site and a blog, and there's no policy anywhere which describes why one site is accepted and another denied. Daring Fireball is an excellent site, but why does it have AdSense ads when Jeremy Zawodny's site doesn't?
Some of these concerns have been covered before, of course. But we all love Google for being transparent and comprehensible. I take it on faith that PageRank is consistent, even if its actual rationale is secret. For example, it frustrates me that googling TypePad doesn't have the TypePad.com site as its first result, but I'm assuming that having somewhere close to 100,000 pages linking to TypePad.com with the exact same text looks like a Google bomb and so it gets filtered out. Fair enough.
The fact that a human rejected my AdSense request with an ostensible rationale troubles me, even if I understand it. Though I'm clearly not as good a writer, I don't see an appreciable difference between my site and Steven Johnson's in terms of being blogs or personal sites. And that seems out of character for Google. The vaunted Google index has, thus far, been a meritocracy. The economic ecosystem that could emerge through AdSense deserves the same equality of opportunity.
11 TrackBacks
Making Sense of AdSense: Don't feel bad, Anil, Gadgetopia was rejected too. We still can't figure out why. "There's a far more serious problem with AdSense, though. The approval system is capricious, even arbitrary. It's understandable that Google want... Read More
http://www.dashes.com/anil/index.php?archives/007315.php#comments... Read More
Almost two months now into the AdSense program and things are going very well. Certainly a small site like mine will not generate enough traffic to get rich on this program, but it would easily pay the hosting fees for anyone who paid such things. Whic... Read More
How Adsense paid out for my PVRblog Read More
How Adsense paid out for my PVRblog Read More
A few weeks ago, Anil Dash had a very informative post about Google's AdSense program. I have implemented this on the mattberther.com front page, in hopes of offering some target advertisements. I believe that Google has really created a non-intrusive... Read More
A few interesting posts regarding Google's AdSense and other ways prosumers (i.e., nano-publishers) can earn some money doing what they do. Mixed opinion f AdSense, but I think it is clear that there will soon be sustainable models for prosumer... Read More
What if Google set up an agreement with TypePad (or other for-pay hosting sites) in which, in order to offset the cost of bandwidth spikes, Google AdSense ads could be (semi-)automatically added to a site when they reached a certain bandwidth point (90... Read More
There are two approaches to making money with a weblog; one is to create a blog specifically for the purpose of making money, the other is to make some money as a by-product of your site. This tutorial will be dealing with the second approach. If you a... Read More
There are two approaches to making money with a weblog; one is to create a blog specifically for the purpose of making money, the other is to make some money as a by-product of your site. This tutorial will be dealing with the second approach. If you a... Read More
AdSense - Can bloggers recoup costs? Read More
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I'm having trouble with the whole rationale behind 'no personal' sites. It wouldn't be diluting the service to offer it to personal sites, and people like you even pointed out (jeremy zawodny) are getting more hits on some things than commercial sites.
The only thing I'm hoping for is that maybe they're cooking something up with blogger to make a blog-centric text-based-ad thing.
I got rejected by Google too and it pissed me off as well. I don't see any difference between one personal site and another. I think the problem Google has with my blog is that it's too diverse: I flit about topics eclectically and with abandon.
If I were focused on Web stuff, I'm sure that they could get some good text ads out of it. Focus is, I think, what makes for good click-through rates and that is certainly what Google desires from the AdSense program.
Well, I do sympathize with other people who've been rejected, but rather than having us all commiserate about our rotten luck, I'm more interested in what ideas you all have about how they could make a consistent acceptance policy.
Clearly, it'd be in their financial interest to make a system that allowed selling to personal sites, perhaps ones with a certain PageRank, or based on number of total click-throughs. And it's easy enough to say no porn sites, no hate sites. But what other considerations should they be making?
As I understand it, once you sign up with Google Ads you are free to place the Ads on other sites. I was rejected for placing ads on my blog, however, I reapplied, stating that I would be placing ads on usefulmac.com (another site I run). When I was accepted, I also added the ads to Puzzleblog (a site which would probably have been rejected, had I applied using this site).
Anil, I get what you're requesting but I think it's a fool's errand. When I owned a small business, I used Google AdWords and they were constantly thwarting my efforts to get my ads in every keyword possible. If I had my druthers, I would have bought the keyword "Phoenix" so that my ad would show up in every search and I would only have to pay for the click-throughs, which would be minimal.
Google would cancel each of those campaigns since they had very low click-through ratios. I didn't care about low CTR because I just wanted my text to show up to build brand awareness. But Google wasn't having any of it and I can understand why. Google's major source of revenue is these tiny classified ads *ahem* and they only get paid when people click.
I can understand why they want to ban personal sites. When I go to blogs with AdSense, I don't think I've ever clicked on a single one. I have, though, when they show up in commercial sites or Matt's TiVo site. They're more of a curiosity in the blogs: "Hey, why are those particular ads showing up?!"
I fully expect that were I able to show AdSense my financial recompense would match that of my Amazon Associates: zilch. Unless my readers just clicked on the ads in a way akin to PayPal donations or Amazon Honor System payments. And I'm absolutely sure that Google doesn't want that (nor would the advertisers).
Interesting. Why isn't the same true for userland, blogger or blogspot?
To go back to Nick's predictions: it makes sense, though -- the type of users who are going to click on an ad with AdWords are going to be no-frills Web users in my mind--people looking for information and then wanting to act upon it ... or am I missing that one entirely?
Generally, no one wants to read something that's really long online, whether because of screen fatigue, fear of getting caught reading at work, or a desire to be away from the slavemaster machine.
As to the site acceptance policy: PageRank seems an excellent way to filter it out. Of course, that will just have wannbe blogger$$$ whoring themselves out even more for incoming links ... but Google's technology combined with people's desire not to have crap links generally solves that system, eh?
It should be called "Google Adsense Voodoo", because it is completely random on who gets accepted. Reading Adsense related postings over at forums like sitepointforums.com, you'll discover that people are added and dropped from their program all the time for no discernable reason.
They do accept personal sites, weblogs, etc. - but it's become some sort of secret Ivy League Ad Club - everyone wants in, many don't make it in, those who do make it in don't know how they got there.
Interesting post, Anil. I'm curious what percentage of AdWords dollars are paid for each click-thru via AdSense. Is it a set percentage? Or does it vary by keyword?
After reading this post, I registered my Bulls weblog and was accepted within hours. I'd consider adding AdSense to my personal site, but like Bill Brown, I rarely click on ads on personal sites, or at all for that matter. And as Nick Denton implied, once the novelty of AdWords wears off, the click-thru payouts will probably decline as well.
I can see your guys' perspective on this, and yeah, it's a bit unfair - but personally, I'd rather not have all the blogs I read polluted with ads, even if they are small and mostly unintrusive.
I'm posting this message anonymously only because I don't want Google coming after me. It's widely known that once you have an AdSense account, you can use it on as many sites as you wish. I got approved with a less-trafficked commercial website of mine. Then, I put the ads on my blog, which gets a LOT more traffic. The program has been very lucrative for me, and I feel that I'm offering a great benefit to my users as well. I highly recommend this approach.
More painful is that Google rejects non-English websites. So my popular Persian weblog, with Google Rank of 6/10, and about 5,000 visitors everyday, can not benefit from AdSense.
googling TypePad doesn't have the TypePad.com site as its first result
Google this: site:www.typepad.com -948
It seems to me that maybe there is some problem - kind of weird that no PR has been assigned to many pages of the site.
I comment because having a keyword in your domain is an SEO stragtegy; the concept being that your keyword would reside in a lot f anchor text pointing to your site.
I agree. It does seem completely random. My blog thing, http://isdickcheneydeadyet.com got accepted to Google's adsense, but one of my e-commerce price comparison engine sites did not. I would have thought that it would have been the opposite.
There is a ton of information about AdSense, some of it marginally useful, on the Amazon.com dicussion boards:
https://associates.amazon.com/exec/panama/associates/tg/trv/-/344951/ref=navrsc/
A number of webmasters claim to be making hundreds of dollars per day on niche oriented content sites. Some of that is BS, but I have no doubt that some of it is true. A dedicated person creating niche websites could probably make 200K a year in my opinion.
It's probably about targeting. On their policies page, Google writes, after saying they don't accept personal pages, "However, if a site contains targeted, text-based content and/or provides a product or service, we may consider it for participation." Personal sites are often probably too unfocused for Google's purposes; they want to make it so that if you see Google ads on a page, you have a high assurance -- they want it to be as high as possible -- that those ads will be relevant to you. That they have humans approving sites means the technology isn't there yet, though; maybe one day they'll be ready to put their ads everywhere. In the meantime, their main worry is the users of the ads, and ensuring that all the ads they see are as useful to them as possible.
I submitted several sites - one was my "lab" and the other was san diego blog - a group blog whose purpose is to cover San Diego California. Both these I really wanted to get in. The lab was rejected because I suppose it is too closely related to my personal site. I also submitted San Diego Spots - also to no avail. It is rather difficult to reconcile how the decisions were made. The human feedback I got was terse and minimal. I asked for feedback as to how the particular sites did/did not qualify, but I got replies to the effect that they did not qualify, and they couldn't give me feedback to improve or change the sites in question so that they would qualify for AdSense.
I figure I'll try again another time.
I put the google ads on my site and had, over the course of 4 days, made about $15 in revenue. I thought this was great. But then today I got an e-mail saying my account was disabled. I was also unable to log into Adsense anymore. They basically banned me. Pasted below is the entire chain of e-mails that happened following my banning from Adsense. Please read it from the bottom up.
-----------
Subject: Re: [#3997478] Account Disabled
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 11:37:24 -0700
From: "Google AdSense"
To: lgates@ironicsandwich.com
Hello Levi,
We understand that you want more specific information about these invalid
clicks we have observed. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the earlier
email, we cannot disclose any specific details of these clicks, due to the
proprietary nature of our monitoring system. We wanted to reassure you,
that we have thoroughly re-reviewed your account data to verify our
findings re-confirmed that invalid clicks were generated on the ads on
your site.
By disabling your account, we feel that we have taken the necessary
measures to ensure that invalid clicks will not continue to occur on your
site.
As outlined in our program Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right
to terminate any publisher's participation at any time.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
----------------
To access the Google AdSense home page or to log in to your account,
please visit: https://www.google.com/adsense
Original Message Follows:
------------------------
From: "Levi G."
Subject: Re: [#3997478] Account Disabled
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 18:02:05 -0000
Can you please explain this a little bit better. I would like to know when
this happened and the IP or IP's that did it. I would also like to know
how I am supposed to prevent people from doing whatever it is that you
said was done. I think this is unfair, my site generates a good deal of
traffic from multiple people including people that visist it every day. It
is listed on other sites as well. How many illegal clicks were made? Was
one person doing it or were many people doing it? I would like some
answers rather than this form letter I was sent.
---------- Original Message -------------
Subject: [#3997478] Account Disabled
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 19:42:46 -0700
From: "Google AdSense"
To: lgates@ironicsandwich.com
Hello Levi,
It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on
the ads on your site(s). We have therefore disabled your Google AdSense
account. Please understand that this step was taken in an effort to
protect the interest of the AdWords advertisers.
A publisher's site may not have invalid clicks on any ad(s), including but
not limited to the use of robots, automated clicking tools, or other
deceptive software.
Practices such as these are in violation of the Google AdSense Terms and
Conditions, which can be viewed at: https://www.google.com/adsense/terms .
Sincerely,
The Google Team
----------------
To access the Google AdSense home page or to log in to your account,
please visit: https://www.google.com/adsense
In my eyes Adsense will be a way to make content based business model viable again. Pay-per-Click advertising is hughely successful and it will continue to do so, once Adsense will even improve.
A couple of weeks ago my husband added AdWords to his hockey blog site (hockeypundits.com) and has made a fair amount of cash. It is just him and ten other commenting on hockey which is cool because they don't have to talk about it when they are over at our place. Today I submitted my personal site which has recipes and my blog on it. What ticked me off was that if my site was called "recipesbyanidiot.com" chances are that the same content would have been accepted. Because it is my own personal domain it isn't accepted? What's up with that? My recipes are separated in their own searchable section.
My thinking is that Google needs to come up with a policy in which they can dictate guidlines for content. As it stands now, they just ask for a domain name. I don't even want Google ads on my entire site. Just the cooking section. Meanwhile they reject the entire domain without even asking which content I want to offer up.
My solution is that Google needs to figure out that the same site can offer drastically differnt content and they need to ask some better questions during sign up -- nature of content, length of duration you anticipate this site is going to be up, what sections do you want ads in and that sort of thing. Then post some guidelines for us personal domain owners who are rejected can make some improvements and be accepted again.
Wow, that's the best discussion I've read on adsence so far. I want to try and use it on my blog, but they do say 'no personal web pages' which I think is unfair. Also, my traffic isn't too high.
I refrained posting earlier because I didn't want to rock my AdSense boat, but of course, Google knows all anyway, so it doesn't matter if I out myself.
Maybe AdSense has an hypothetical ad mix or an algorithm that is indicative of a "personal site." When you submit a site for the network, Google throws a bunch of ads at it and sees what sticks. Obviously, there's not a one-size solution, but it could filter applications for human review.
As for the suspension thing, it's in the TOS that you can't encourage clickthroughs, and I was asked to remove the heading, "cake for greg.org," which I thought was pretty innocuous. Guess not. I decided to change it--for about $100 a month.
They've added support for a few other languages (French, German, Italian, and Spanish).
http://www.google.com/services/adsense_new.html
Hi,
I have written an article on Adsense wayback in July.I belived that it would be stupendous success.Which it is today.
Incidentally I have titled it as Making sense of Adsense.
Have heard of me I am Aravind Prasad G.
Interesting discussion of the acceptance criteria. AdSense has been wonderful for me. I put ads on ReligiousResources.org, back in July, and then a couple more sites after that. Prior to that, we'd never made a dime off any of these sites. In September, we made $850. It's amazing!!!
For what it's worth, some of these inexplicable rejections by AdSense are because they claim they only approve domains and not subdomains. So (to take my example), I can't try out ads on communique.portland.or.us unless I happen to be the owner of portland.or.us as well (which of course I'm not). In theory, this would mean that people with *.typepad.com domains won't be getting approved for AdSense, and might also explain why jeremy.zawodny.com was rejected.
Hey Guys, I love your site and work on Adsense. I'm new to this game, but I have seen really strange irrelevancy problems with adsense. When I use the Adsense without the typepad subdomain (My own forwarded typed url ADNS record too, at GoDaddy) I ALWAYS am served the "March of Dimes," house ads. But when I originally built the site and was rejected with Adsense and purchased a URL, I now get junk ads.
When I use the Adsense sensor it confirms my fears. SO I don't know how to fix it.
Thx
I just got the "It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on the ads on your web pages" letter.
The only way I can think of this working is:
1. Google recording the IP addresses from which you log into the http://www.google.com/adsense.
2. Google comparing the IP addresses of every click against those IP addresses stored in Step #1.
One small problem being NAT. Let's say I work at MegaCorp as my day job, and I maintain a web page after-hours. Occasionally, I like to review my AdSense stats at work.
All 65,000 employees of MegaCorp are behind a farm of NAT firewalls, so they all appear to come from the same IP address. Therefore, if any of those 65,000 MegaCorp employees choose to browse my web page and then choose to click on an AdSense ad -- suddenly the Google "invalid click" detectors go nuts.
It seems impossible that this system could ever work properly.
On another note, what CTR's are people seeing? I got the note, and my CTR's are averaging 1.5.
Hey guys, trust me, those of you havent been considered for Google AdSense should not loose heart, because the clickthrough rates are very discouraging. Except mental piece and a dream for a silver bullet, it cant even pay for your hosting charges or at the best only that.
I am not revealing myself, but I am one of the approved AdSense member and the clickthrough rate at my site is 5% at the best.
Good material but I have had a poor experience with adsense an say so here - http://www.rant-here.com/drupal/node/55 - Wondering if anyone can address these issues and give some good advice?
Thanks for this post. I have a hard time finding good content
related to this subject when searching most of the time.
I also run a blog similar to yours and here’s part of one of my
recent posts…
Google Adsense pays you approximately 30 days after the end of the month in which you become eligible to receive payment. You become eligible for payment only when your Adsense account reaches at least $100.00.
Check it out and let me know what you think…
Thanks,