Think about it. I know Adsense is a very popular way to monetize websites, especially here among the DP community. But think about the concept for one second. Someone is willing to pay you AND Google for those clicks. Do you think they are just foolishly throwing their money away? Most likely the answer is no. Many affiliates just like yourself are advertising those products themselves through various affiliate networks via Google Adwords and making significantly higher profits because of it. That $0.50 click they just bought from you may have very well turned into $32 or more for them. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the point in being yet another middle man and selling your traffic for pennies via Adsense when you could be promoting those products via CPA networks yourself and be making way more cash. Something to think about.
Hey really a thoughtful message Scar. Ofcourse even I use to think a lot why the hell I must create 100 sites inorder for google to get a adplacement on my sites for some one who is earning from advertisers.
But the conversion rates are low, so not all clicks turn into buyers, but when you sell ppc traffic on your site you get paid for the click regardless of the click resulted in purchase or not. Ive heard of a few networks where you replace your ppc ad slots with CPA ad slots so you can gain more if the click converts. I forgot the network name but there already exists such an CPA revenue-sharing network that shares CPA fees if the click converts and it replaces PPC ad slots.
If you have high traffic, you could potentially sell advertising space yourself and cut out Google's commission. Or, you could sign up with pay per lead programs (CPA) - however, Adsense is a good option for a lot of sites simply because of ease of use and the high, targeted ad inventory.
Most people use google adsense because of several reasons. 1 - they do not know how to sell advertising directly to companies. 2 - their site is too small to sell advertising. So google sells banners in bulk and parses them out to sites regardless of size. 3 - they either do not know how to, or can not setup a script to run ad campaigns. Sure people can download openX and setup their own ads. But most people do not have a server to run it on. There seem to be 3 different types of webmasters. The ones who use free or really cheap hosting, those that rent a Virtual Private Server (VPS) and those that lease a dedicated server. The ones with the dedicated servers and large sites are more likely to be able to run their own ad campaign. The people that have to use free hosting or really cheap hosting do not have sites big enough, or the resources to sell ad space directly to companies. Using adsense is easy for the companies. I can spend $100 and let google deal with handing out the ads. Instead of having to look for sites that fit my niche. I guess the main selling point of adsense - its easy for everyone involved.
Many people use Adsense simply to pay their hosting bill monthly, while others have been known to start Adsense and start making good money within their first few months.Thus, Adsense is still a great program for everyone.
You raise a good and important point, at one point in time AdSense was "easy" money that is really no longer the case. Its much harder to make decent money using AdSense than it once was!
Adsense at the top of a webpage is a complete waste of good website real estate. Have it at the bottom of the page and your money banners or whatever at the top and at the side. I think that makes good sense for 'adsense pittance'.
You cant think in this way. I believed all the adwords user know that it is hard to get as you mentioned Yes, CPA can bring higher revenue but the adwords user are not getting 100% conversion, maybe they are spend $100 without single sell, it depends on how good the website. In this case, the adwords user might lose money, compare to the adsense user with no risk, they worth to get more profit. It is always happen that high risk high revenue