If you're an honest, hardworking webmaster, here's why you shouldn't use Adsense

Assuming you don't do any shady crap and are honest about Adsense, and maintain your site and your traffic is all quality, here's why you shouldn't use Adsense.

1)Not maintaining direct contact with the advertiser.
Wouldn't you rather talk to an advertiser directly? Instead, you've got to deal with a jenky Adsense team whose policy changes from rep to rep.

2)Lower CPC
Google takes 50% of every click? So you're telling me the advertisers are paying 10 cents, and you're only getting 5. Even less after taxes! Why not find your own advertisers, charge 7.5 cents per click, they'll go with you over Google, AND you make more money.

3)Set your own policy!
If you've got an arcade site, and your advertiser wants to show off his arcade site, they won't care if you put an arcade-related image next to their arcade ad. They just won't! With Google, it's a problem.

4)Know what you're advertising
By using Google Adsense, you could easily be sending traffic to MFA and other crap sites. If you've got great quality traffic, why should you send it to some scumbag in Argentina at 1.5 cents per click? If you manage your own advertising, you can accept and decline certain sites.

5)Your traffic is worth more!
For many niches, the advertiser is making more than you. They're selling a $10 product and receiving 1,000 visitors for $50. They only need 5 conversions before they profit. If you've got high quality traffic, you know that you could be getting them 3x that. And look what you've made. $25, and they've made $100!

These are just a few things. There are more, and I'll get to those later.

 

Why even consider ppc just go for affiliate companies. Pay per click is not as lucrative as it used to be.

 

But many small and medium scale publishers rely on Adsense or other related programmes. Direct advertisement needs some qualified websites,then only its possible to get some.

 

I know. That's why this doesn't apply to the new startup, but I'm saying NO ONE should be making $100/day on Adsense, because at that point your site should be big enough to sustain it's own ad program.

 

I think you overstimate the value of traffic. Most websites get so little traffic that advertisers with lots of money won't even look at them. Something like 100 uniques a day won't get you more many using the direct approach vs AdSense. Most people know that once your site hits the big time, AdSense is no longer the way to monetize and do actually sell ads on their own terms. The key to this is to actually become one of these big sites. Until then, AdSense is not all that bad.

PS: Of course nobody forces people to use AdSense as raynman said, people can go the affiliate marketing root if they so wish.

 

good points...once you have significant traffic it makes sense to negotiate your own deal with advertisers -- not only will you get a much greater cut of the profits but you won't have to worry about being click bombed, banned from adsense, accidentally violating the TOS, etc.

 

I agree with you, but it only applies to very high traffic sites

 

Actually this is one of the things that appeals to me about Adsense. They may make a lot of rules, but it's less hassle to follow them than it is to spend the time finding suitable advertisers and dealing with them.

This is especially true if you run several sites in different niches, rather than just one or two.

 

Adsense has it's place

Direct advertising has it's place

That's how things are

 

I agree for BIG sites... adsense is probably not the way to go (unless you want some easy pocket change)

What would you suggest for sites 100 uniques and under per day?

 

Google takes closer to around 75%... not 50.

 

the thread topic is
"... honest, hardworking webmaster ..."
no hardworking honest webmaster makes 100 uniques a day
but he of course will have thousands or more a day
and since it's about hard working - the traffic increases months after months with FAR more than 100 uniques MORE every months for as long as you keep on working !!!

hence I agree partially with the initial thread statements ...

BUT

my experience is that by the time a website has grown to an "adult" SIZE and reaches around 10'000 uniques a day OTHER advertising companies and business start contacting YOU as site owner and asking / offering other advertisement options. near end last year when my site reached that level of traffic, I received within weeks several offers/inquiries from major OTHER ad-companies for a variety of other options like affiliate, pop up/under, banner ads, etc
...

while I am potentially prepared to include other advertising options - by adding / installing an adserver ( NOT yet in use ) - I also opted first for a full effort in adsense optimization and increased my adsense revenue so drastically that the offers all others made so far appear small compared to the extra work and extra risk a change of ad-partner includes.
hence I stay with G and keep on studying adsense optimization to get the real maximum out of adsense.

MFA is no topic at all for me - only if I overload the pages with ad units and if i have less serious advertisers on a particular topic than i have ad-slots on that page - if your site has a certain level of attraction based on quality and high generic traffic - attraction to good business, then their bids will be so much higher that MFA drop out like foul eggs and only reappear for hours or days during low low industry business hours or days every now and then.

when looking at the 50:50 of G ....
also look at the adsense referral bonus ( I just rcvd my first 250$ bones last month ) and look at the overall time you need to individually deal with ad-partners.

time=money
time for admin used is missing time for productivity

myself as a one man operation I would never have the time to spend contracting thousands of advertisers to cover all the site topics/countries/pages/languages i have. hence i feel G's share is nearly honest for the service and k$ i earn compared to the excellent service G provides in keeping me totally free to do what I love to do - publish nice attractive unique content.

 

What kind of numbers do you need to attract advertisers directly?

Edit: Oh, I see hans says 10,000 uniques or more per day. Ok. Sounds reasonable to me.

 

Me too:

Adsense is a great way to help cover those start-up development costs as well as pay for other costs..

Then when your site gets huge, you can think about direct ads sales.