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Adsense Ads

 
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I saw Mr. Wheaton had started his residual stream with adsense banners and hope this is the place to ask everything about how to make them, how to ad them, and how to organize them.
I just went to google adsense to try to add them to my wordpress blog but ran into difficulty with requirements about not have subdomains etc.
So how do I make a banner for my blog and can I get around the requirements?

This is a great topic. Love you for this Mr. Wheaton.
 
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I first set up adsense back in .... 2002? (guessing)

At first, the coin was amazing! I was getting something like $4000 per month! Then it quickly dwindled down to $400 per month. Over the years it has fluctuated between $400 and $2000 per month.

I started noticing that they would report that I was getting some huge amount per thousand impressions, but then I learned that I would give them 100,000 impressions and they would say that they showed their stuff for 20,000 impressions. So it made it seem like the payout was five times higher than it really was. But I think this difference comes from a lot of different factors, including people using adblocker. further, I now think the difference might be much closer to 100,000 -> 10,000. At least it is easier to do the math.

The great thing about adsense is that it is super easy to get started. And easy to put in. Now that their system has been around for such a very long time, it is very robust.


 
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I'm not sure whether this will answer any of Amber's specific questions but it seems like a good place to share a couple of my observations about working with advertising networks that place third-party ads on your websites in exchange for keeping a substantial percentage of that third-party advertiser's payment. (AdSense is only the largest and best-known of these networks; there are zillions of them.)

If you are a publisher of websites, there are several potential problems with this arrangement. None of these are reasons not to use ad networks; if you want to monetize a small website, you don't have a lot of better alternatives. It's just some stuff to be keeping your eyes open about and to think about when you design your pages.

1) You typically don't get any control over what is advertised. On Permies, this has translated into AdSense ads showing up for various "toxic gick" non-permie agricultural products, to everyone's consternation. If your website takes a position on any subject, you have to be aware that your network ads may very well end up advertising products or services on the "other side" of whatever controversy exists.

2) You typically don't get any control over how the ads look. Network advertisers are "brilliant" at coming up with ads that look like structural parts of your website (the classic example is a big "Download NOW" button) in order to trick your readers into clicking. This can be pretty frustrating if you try to run a clean website and are opposed to having your surfers be confused and tricked into clicking things they didn't want.

3) Advertising networks tend to attract advertisers with dubious ethics, who want to sell magic pills and powders and products that are all sales pitch and no function. Because of #1 above, any website with too many network ads begins to look like those "back page of the magazine" advertising pages in the pulp mags and comic books of the mid-1900s. It can be hard to stay proud of your website and its content if it has got too many Amazing Sea Monkeys, Miracle X-Ray Spectacles, and Awesome Herbal Solutions For Male Potency all over the place.

4) Some advertising networks -- perhaps all of them -- have long lists of forbidden topics; if your website strays into any of them, they can pull your ads and stop paying you, sometimes without warning. So putting up network advertising is somewhat akin to agreeing to some corporate censorship. For example, Google doesn't allow AdSense on adult sites. "Fine" you think, "I wasn't going to put up a porn site anyway." But I had a gaming site for awhile where I would routinely post chat logs from inside the game. Some of these were extremely profane, and the rich stew of cuss words triggered Google's "adult sites" filter. So I lost my Adsense ads on that blog about internet spaceship politics. I could have saved the Adsense but I would have had to lose the chat logs, and they were an important part of my content.

Paul nonetheless works with Adsense quite happily, and so can you. Just know what you're getting into, and design both your site and your expectations accordingly.

 
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When using Adsense, realize that they change their secret methods for online content searching quite often. That can suddenly change how many appropriate visitors come to your site and the value of the ads placed on your page. You have to keep up with it. For example, it used to be that if people wanted to attract blueberry farmers to their websites, they could find a way to insert the words "blueberry farming" into their online blueberry article a hundred times so the article would be the first one found by Google when potential readers were searching for the information on blueberries they were providing. That's long been dismissed by Google and is considered "keyword stuffing." The search engine would tend to bypass a website with that type of content. That's just one of many examples.
 
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Dan Boone wrote:
1) You typically don't get any control over what is advertised. On Permies, this has translated into AdSense ads showing up for various "toxic gick" non-permie agricultural products, to everyone's consternation. If your website takes a position on any subject, you have to be aware that your network ads may very well end up advertising products or services on the "other side" of whatever controversy exists.



I would be quite happy if my enemies were funding me while reducing their own funds

For a while, on a few political sites I frequent, I would even go so far as to click on ads for political candidates I loathe just to ensure they were paying my favorite sites. That is ethically dubious though, so I don't do it any longer.

Dan Boone wrote:
3) Advertising networks tend to attract advertisers with dubious ethics, who want to sell magic pills and powders and products that are all sales pitch and no function. Because of #1 above, any website with too many network ads begins to look like those "back page of the magazine" advertising pages in the pulp mags and comic books of the mid-1900s. It can be hard to stay proud of your website and its content if it has got too many Amazing Sea Monkeys, Miracle X-Ray Spectacles, and Awesome Herbal Solutions For Male Potency all over the place.



This is why using one or very few ad placements is better. Also, keeping them separated from your content is good so that ads are more obvious.

Of course ad blockers are so good and easy that I end up using them - mostly because ethically dubious advertisers keep trying harder to be more intrusive so you have to go to war with them. But I do like ad blockers that allow you to whitelist sites (i.e. you can say "allow ads to be displayed on permies.com").

Some sites (weather underground is one) allow you to pay for a premium account where ads don't get displayed (at least that's what it says when it detects my ad blocker). I tried that many years ago on one site I ran and almost no one signed up.
 
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There are a lot of good replies here, but having used Adsense a fair amount in the past (I don't any more) I have a few other thoughts that might help.

There's a component of the Adsense algorithm that determines what you'll get paid for each click. Google calls this "Smart Pricing," and I believe it's similar to the Quality Score they give landing pages for Adwords ads (the other side of the contextual advertising system that is Adsense).

You can get a general, albeit often inaccurate, idea of the per-click average charge for an Adwords click by looking at specific keywords in the Google Keyword Planner. Bear in mind, the info you're shown for traffic and charge per click (CPC) can be wrong.

But, Adsense publishers are paid a portion of what the advertisers pay Google per click, minus whatever discount Smart Pricing may calculate. This can vary over time, based on the assessed quality of your page, the conversions of the traffic you send, etc.

Others have mentioned that you might not have a lot of control over what ads are displayed on your site. You have some, and you can white/black list domains, etc. But, also keep in mind that re-marketing, i.e. displaying ads personalized to a certain user based on their past behavior, is a huge part of these display ads, and growing. So, you'll likely not be aware of that, or have any way to know what these ads are.

The main benefit of Adsense is it's ease of use. If you have a high traffic site, it could potentially lead to a significant amount of income. Or, it could pay your hosting or your electric bill.

For most people though, if you're interested in a long-term and stable strategy to make money online, you probably be best served by following a content marketing strategy of identifying your audience, creating content of value for them, building a relationship, an email list, and creating your own products. Also, multiple traffic sources are as important as multiple income streams.
 
Amber Adler
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This is all great information. Specifically:

Do I have to host a site to display ads?

How do I insert a banner?

I am okay at HTML so I can figure it out with a intermediate level of proficient direction.

What are my choices for ad sites?

Thank you all for the responses! These threads are really great! (I am uploading my book to kindle now!)
 
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Dan Boone wrote:... too many Amazing Sea Monkeys...



OH, but I LOVED sea monkeys when I was little! (till I bought some, and THEN I learned a valuable lesson, hahahaha! - still, they hold a special place in my foggy memory!)

to all - thanks for this info re 'adsense'; I had NO idea what is was.
 
Amber Adler
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Thanks to all of your replies and insight: I have been attempting to navigate the Adsense ocean for a few days and came up with a few rules:

Unless you are on blogspot, you must own your site or pay for a plugin.
Adsense won't start paying on a blogspot blog for at least six months.

Chitika is the service I signed up for on my new blogspot: they pay through paypal.
It was easy to insert the javascript into a blogspot blog in the gadgets of the layout section.

Wordpress:

Wordpress doesn't permit the use of plugins on their free blog service. They also strip javascript.
For (only) $99 per year you can use plugins for a store or ads.
(I chose to download the xml for my past blog posts and re-load them on a new blogspot.)
Too bad for Adsense, they have to wait six months for my clicks.

CafePress:

The CafePress Widget appears broken. I really don't know how to fix it. Google doesn't either and gives me a message saying the widget is broken. I tried inserting ads into my CafePress Store- it stripped the java.

Mr. Wheaton you are the Java King. Whilst thou lend me the link to your Java Kingdom?
 
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JavaRanch: http://javaranch.com

 
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Barb Adams wrote:When using Adsense, realize that they change their secret methods for online content searching quite often. That can suddenly change how many appropriate visitors come to your site and the value of the ads placed on your page. You have to keep up with it. For example, it used to be that if people wanted to attract blueberry farmers to their websites, they could find a way to insert the words "blueberry farming" into their online blueberry article a hundred times so the article would be the first one found by Google when potential readers were searching for the information on blueberries they were providing. That's long been dismissed by Google and is considered "keyword stuffing." The search engine would tend to bypass a website with that type of content. That's just one of many examples.



This is largely irrelevant now. Google's algorithms are too advanced to be tricked by the casual keyword stuffers in terms of results and this was never really an Adsense revenue optimization strategy. It is also important to understand that Google targets ads to individuals based on factors like their geographic location, and their browsing and search patterns. The ads a person sees on a site like this may not be related to permaculture topics at all, and are likely different than the ads that other users see.
 
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Google targets ads to individuals based on factors like their geographic location, and their browsing and search patterns.


They also phish all email going through Gmail. If "horses" appears in your inbox/outbox, you are likely to find horse related ads.
 
Space seems cool in the movies, but once you get out there, it is super boring. Now for a fascinating tiny ad:
turnkey permaculture paradise for zero monies
https://permies.com/t/267198/turnkey-permaculture-paradise-monies
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