Adsense never looked pretty but with recent changes when they added these huge arrows it became unbearable… I mean just look at this!
It looks even worse with huge white spaces when the entire square is targeted by only one advertiser (which I see very often)…
Some advise to use image only ads, but these can be pretty ugly too and people don’t click much on them anyway. This type of ads pursue me online
I’ve seen this wonderful banana on my site in 300×600 size. I should have captured it.
I am not fat, I just have weight loss site, by the way…
Adsense made a BIG part of my online income until yesterday and this decision wasn’t very easy. I am still in the process of removing ads. I own some smaller sites and I have no plan B for them or time to figure it out, but most of my Adsense should be gone soon.
Ugliness is not the only reason. I sell direct advertising too and having Adsense on my pages undermines my efforts. There is no point to pay me a fixed amount of $ every day for having a banner on my sidebar, when you can target me via Adsense and have your ads inside my content and pay ONLY when someone clicks.
I will see how it goes.
I think this is a very brave decision. On the one hand I think it is still a bit of “pocket money”, and if nothing else then the few pennies come in at least.
On the other hand I do agree with your statement “There is no point to pay me a fixed amount of $ every day for having a banner on my sidebar, when you can target me via Adsense and have your ads inside my content and pay ONLY when someone clicks.”
I would appreciate to find out more about direct selling of advertising. What would one have to do to make a new site or a site with a low PR attractive enough for advertisers to pay for a banner or text link for a fixed price?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts
Hello sbi-it and thanks for your comment
Direct advertising needs a little more effort than Adsense but once you find what works for you, you’ll get more income and you’ll feel more secure. It might take time though. I am still not 100% filled yet, so I have work to do
To sell direct advertising you need a few things in place:
- you need some traffic. If your site is very niche you don’t need huge amounts of traffic, a couple of hundreds of highly targeted visitors will do. You will then need to find highly targeted advertisers and explain them why your little site is likely to be very valuable to them. It’s all about the precision and targeting. If you are using Adsense right now you can go to your Adsense dashboard, click Allow and Block Ads, then choose Ads (Ad Review Cente) and you’ll see ads that are currently on your site. You can find someone who matches your niche perfectly, think of a good deal for you and them and contact them with offer. This is against Adsense TOS, but if you don’t advertise this fact I don’t think they will know.
- you need a way to bill them and a guarantee that you will be paid.
Looking for advertisers, negotiating deals and processing the bills can be very time consuming. There are different solutions for that, but I personally still prefer using a third party network who will do the job, take their cut and send me my check. Very often, they will also find you customers (although you should try to look for them yourself too).
I work with Blogads, I wrote about them here
http://webmasterdiary.org/advertising/blogads-review/
and also there is BuySellAds. I didn’t try them, but it seems that prices there are much lower and it would be harder to compete with other publishers.
You might be wondering how it’s different from Adsense since you are still having someone take a cut and you are right. But still you earn more, your site looks better, you have more control of what appears on your site. In the beginning you might earn less than with Adsense because advertisers don’t know your website yet and for most of the time your sidebars will be empty, but over time you must be able to build “customers database”. If you have information-based website, your customers are your advertisers basically, not readers.
It seems like you need at least 3500 page impressions per week (in Google Analytics) to get advertisers from BlogAds. They might accept you with lower numbers, but your site will be invisible in marketplace.
Yeah those are some nasty looking arrows.
I haven’t had any significant decrease in CTRs as of this moment so hopefully google has done it’s testing. Still this is a sure way to “dirty up” a design. Aesthetically, this is not pleasing to look at, at all!
So now that you’ve ditched adsense, what alternatives will you be looking at Media.Net? Or will you mainly focus on other products besides advertising?
PS: You need to post more often… I likek reading your posts :-p
PPS: Why no HTML in comments–spam? You should at least allow blockquotes and other formatting stuff like italics, bold for adding emphasis.
Peace.
Hi RogueSkolar, yesss I will fix HTML thing now. I was playing with my comments for a while and for most time they weren’t available at all. I will go look if I can fix it. I am using anti-spam plugin and it messed up some stuff.
I tried Media.net before but it didn’t work for me and besides that they are not much different than Adsense. You still don’t have much control. I will focus on affiliate products and direct advertising.
Thanks for your comment
Yeah monetizing via adsense, media.net and similar is something I want to move away from. It’s just small fry plus of course as you’ve mentioned there’s the lack of control with how you can promote the ads. If I don’t completely scrap the model altogether, I will strictly limit it to only the highest performin pages.
What I really want to make happen is an ecommerce store to sell products and kits that are related to the projects I create on my websites (they’re all project/diy focused). In this sense I want to become a “full blown” distributor. Oh and definitely in place of adsense, I definitely want to sell advertising space instead.
The thing about adsense and other similar advertising models is that it is real easy to set and provides some kind of income whilst growing a site. After a certain point then I think it can diminish a site’s reputation especially if you’re not one of those major publisher’s like (WSJ, NY Times etc) that have the luxury of customizing the appearance the ads that get served.
I see you fixed up the comments.
Kudos
Right. The problem with Adsense is that it’s addictive. You kind of settle for it. You aren’t happy with it and in theory you understand you could do better if you stretched yourself a little and at the same time you can’t move away.
Good luck with your e-commerce project, that sounds very interesting!
Elena,
I hear you on the eCommerce idea. I’ve also pulled Adsense from my website last week. Now I’m reviewing my contents and writing more contents (blogs) to build content base. I’ve been exploring Opencart lately for eCommerce. I’ve taken the first step – moving away from Adsense.
Yes, Adsense can be quite addictive. Unfortunately I had to go back to it on one of my sites, as it stayed with no revenues. And still my long term plan is to find a way to make all my sites Adsense-free. Good luck to you in your e-commerce endeavors!