Back in October, I decided to run Google AdSense ads on my site. I wasn’t expecting a lot of money, but I was hoping to see enough for the site to pay for its hosting.
Unfortunately, AdSense isn’t going to do it.
I added AdSense on October 20, 2007. On November 7, 2007 it broke $1. On November 21, 2007 it broke $2. On November 24, 2007 it broke $3. On December 5, 2007 it broke $4 and hit $4.26. It hasn’t moved again since. That’s over two months.
I wondered at first if I’d broken something. I refreshed all the AdSense code, and even expanded the number of ads I was serving. Nothing. Since December 5, 2007 I haven’t seen a penny.
Oh, sure, maybe it will get better, but it isn’t going to get that much better. Maybe I could reasonably expect to see a hundred dollars by the time my boy wants higher education (he’s nine months old now), but I don’t think it’s worth looking at the ads (and their ever-decreasing quality) until then.
And so it comes time to bid AdSense farewell. It was a compromise that simply wasn’t worth it, but I’d like to think I learned something from the experience. Although other than AdSense doesn’t work, I’m not sure what that would be.
February 18th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Your syndication feed contains the whole content of your articles so your AdSense clicks are going to be from people who aren’t looking at your feed. This might also explain why the number of clicks went down as people subscribed?
February 18th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
I’ve heard other complaints about a sudden drop in AdSense revenue. Now it could be punishment for running text link ads, but given the income from them vs. the income from AdSense (not to mention the lesser annoyance), it’s an easy choice to drop AdSense.
My page view numbers didn’t really drop, and I don’t have many RSS subscribers. But if I can pretend for a moment that I did, it would still be an easy choice. I’m writing because I enjoy writing, not because I need a few pennies per month. I’m not compromising the goal of putting the writing in front of as many eyes as possible to make a few dollars.