It’s finally happend. Recently I’ve been reading more and more blogs that are greatly reducing their reliance on Google AdSense or removing the AdSense from their sites altogether. The most recent blog to jump off the AdSense boat is Problogger.net. Today, in his posting called A New Look For Pro Blogger, Darren states that he has decided to remove Adsense from his blog and move to private 125X125 advertising.
I can’t say that I’m surprised by this move. If you read posts from some of the larger blogs that show their monthly income reports, Adsense continually takes a back seat when compared to other advertising income. Over at JohnChow.com, the July 2007 Monthly Income Report shows Adsense income at only 5.33% of the total ($661.73). While this would be a great income for most blogs, having half of your workable posting space used by Adsense may not be worth 5.33% more money to high income bloggers.
I myself will continue to host Google AdSense ads on my site. Since I am currently only one month old, I am still developing the relationships needed to create multiple streams of income online. That being said, I still think Google ads have a place in any blog. Perhaps they can simply take a less prominent position or be modified (through Google) to be less intrusive and conform with the look and feel of the site.
Is anyone out there thinking about dropping AdSense too?
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Tags: google adsense, problogger, income stream, blogging, blog summary, multiple streams of income
Wow, I didn’t even know Problogger was getting a new theme. Anyway, his dropping Adsense in no way marks the end of Adsense. I understand it in his situation because he has many other options and many buyers for private ads. But, most people don’t have so many followers/ people wanting to buy ads on the site. It depends on the site’s design too, Adsense works with some and not on others. People will continue to use Adsense, I can guarantee that, its just that for some Adsense is not the best option.
Posted by Webd360 | August 8, 2007, 7:13 pmI may give Google Search a try on my blog, but I really don’t have any plans to ad Google AdSense to it. I use AS on some of my web sites, and the results are less than thrilling. Google’s “smart pricing” and stuff like that is making it more and more difficult to make anything worthwhile from AdSense. It may be great in some niches, but otherwise, why waste the screen real estate? Sure, it’s free, but it’s also free to put up an affiliate ad or link instead.
Posted by dcr | August 9, 2007, 12:19 amI will consider resigning from AdSense when I will earn more with other streams of income. Before that Google is my boss
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Posted by shman | August 9, 2007, 12:30 pmMaybe we’ll luck out and Darren will post some comparative stats about how he did with Adsense vs how he fares with the new self-hosted ads….
Posted by Zen Zoomie | August 9, 2007, 2:43 pmI don’t know how many of you are apple fans, but in their recent release of iweb (as part of the ilife software) they have integrated functions to easily ad adsense to any webpages you create. That should bring them a good number of new advertisers; I’d say this is far from the end.
Posted by Webd360 | August 10, 2007, 10:27 amI agree with you there. Google sure isn’t going away any time soon. I just found it interesting that Google AdSense is becoming less valuable to those sites that have great traffic and make a lot of money. I don’t think Google will be happy being the online advertiser for the millions of small-low traffic sites. They want to be the big guy in every arena.
Posted by Lewis | August 10, 2007, 11:55 pmUnfortunately for some, their screen real estate isn’t worth all that much to begin with! I think Google AdSense is a great addition to any website as long as it is well integrated. Based on what I’ve read out there, I know the real money comes from increasing your visitors and then selling your space…
Posted by Lewis | August 10, 2007, 11:57 pmThey own a lot of us. It takes a lot of traffic to get those other income streams up but when they get there…$$$
Posted by Lewis | August 10, 2007, 11:58 pmThat would be great to see (at least for interest’s sake). I don’t think it will really affect my decision to show AdSense since Darren has such a large readership. Maybe when my RSS hits 23,000 I’ll reconsider my options!
Posted by Lewis | August 11, 2007, 12:00 amI am an Apple fan and I have colleagues who are devoted fans. I’m going to be looking at laptops in the near future so I need to keep this feature in mind. Will it help a guy who actually knows all about HTML coding?
Posted by Lewis | August 11, 2007, 12:02 am