Adsense on Your Blog, Worthless?

06. Jan 2007 | 5 Comments

I read Guy Kawasaki’s blog today & he mentions that in the year he’s been blogging his blog has generated:

2,436,117 page views
$3,350 in Adsense Revenue

Guy’s blog is the 45th most popular blog on the internet. And he’s only earning over $3,000 per year with Adsense?

I think the main problem is that adsense is just too easy. People just slap it up on their blog & don’t really look at Affiliates or other revenue streams that are

More targeted
Have Higher Payouts
Look less Ugly

I personally am trying to move away from adsense altogether on all of my sites.

This really doesn’t give Bloggers much hope does it?

But WAIT! this is just direct revenues from the website.

What we’re not told about are the indirect revenues that Guy makes from all the Seminars, Speeches & Consultancy. This is where the real money is to be made. Blogs are perfect for attracting this sort of consultancy work. Chances are, if you have a high traffic blog you’ll be receiving offers left right & center for partnerships & knowledge.

So whilst Guy may not be raking it in from Adsense, he sure is possibly raking the cash in elsewhere. One thing to note also is this:

I can’t even see Adsense on Guy’s Blog anymore. Perhaps revealing his income has now swayed some Direct Advertisers to sign him up for more than Google are paying?

Gotta love the Advertising World

UPDATE: I’m not saying in this post that Adsense is worthless. I make more than Guy does, with way less traffic. What I’m getting at here is that if Adsense works for you then that’s awesome. But there’s far bigger things once you get past the need for Adsense. It’s only the beginning

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5 Comments on "Adsense on Your Blog, Worthless?"

paul 07. Jan 2007, 3:03 am

I remember reading somewhere that he just switched over to Federated Media. His earnings should be much higher now.

Jason Pedersen 07. Jan 2007, 4:12 am

Hopefully he will start earning more revenue now. This isn’t the most encouraging post, by the way.
I noticed you changed the location of your adsense. Tell us how it works for you.

K Scott 07. Jan 2007, 7:18 am

You may be jumping to a bit of a conclusion here. There are a few reasons why he’s not making more money, all of which have nothing to do with the potential of the AdSense system:

1. His ad-placement is not optimized.
2. His audience is too sophisticated. I wonder what his CTR is.

Case in point: I run a tech blog aimed at casual computer users, which gets 1/6 of Kawaski’s traffic, yet makes 4x as much money.

Samuel 08. Jan 2007, 9:14 am

Very Low Earn for a Year to be the with in the most popular blog. I think.

Mike 26. Jan 2007, 3:53 pm

I’ve been doing this for 6 months and have already made 3 times that. I have no clue who this guy is but that’s pretty lame.