If your site is a popular community and has awesome user-created content, people stay on the site, are not interested in ads and become ad blind. Adsense only works on garbage sites, because people want to get out of there because there's nothing to do... so they click ads. Sadly, this is reality and the web gets flooded with crappy MFA sites.
fatabbot, Is that your own opinion? If adsense only work on garbage sites and not optimize in SERP, how can get traffic and who will click the ads?
It seems to me that the site you are describing, a popular community with awesome user-created content, would have a lot of returning visitors and those visitors would become ad-blind as you write. I'm not sure that the problem lies with adsense, but rather with ad blindness in general. Why not try different types of ads? If you have a lot of regular visitors who never click, CPM ads could be a good option. That way you get credited for making a good and thriving site. The problem you describe surely is the essense of the challenge that this forum faces, namely a lot of returning visitors, mostly webmaster and people working with ads (known to never or rarely click any ads). Still they manage to make a good revenue from what I understand. Learn from what they have done - revenue sharing, rotating different colors in the top right banner etc. You've already stated the problem, now think of a way to fix it! I totally agree with you on the MFA sites though. It's frustrating to see all the sites that get good positions in the SEs and are only there to serve ads and nothing else. Maybe Google should add more weight to content/ads ratio or something. It would be less tempting to make MFA sites if you actually had to do some work to get paid well. Then again, that could lead to lots of looong and boring articles nobody would ever want to read through. It's quite the predicament, as I'm sure Google fully aware of.
This is true, but if you have a community-oriented site that's SEO'd and has good amounts of organic traffic, you will get clicks.
CPM Is a solution which I also use, combined with Adsense. Tribalfusion gives me the best results, but few people know that most cpm programs also base campaign CPM values on the clicktru rate of the campaign. In other words, ad-blind users make CPM go down over time. Ad blindless is a big problem these days. Lots of people also have browser plugins installed to disable ads completely. About 20% of my visitors come from search engines and I think those are responsible for most of the income.
I'd agree that community sites get lower click rates (use pay per impression instead then). But sites that aren't community based can be good ones too. There are plenty of news and blog sites that I visit on a regular basis or find through search engines and none of them are crappy sites. Hell, there are plenty of community based sites that suck.
Well, you're probably right about this. It's a paradox really, good sites are punished and bad sites are rewarded. People are mainly driven by fear, hope, and self interest. They have an interest in using your great site, but they don't want to pay for it by say clicking any ads although the service is free and serving ads is the only way for you to make the site available to them. And to top it off we are not allowed to kindly ask people to click an ad they find interesting if they enjoy using the site. I know, it sucks. Have you tried any affiliate stuff? If it's a community, make some kind of competition and offer some reward to a few of the ones who buy stuff through your links. If enough people participate you should be able to make a profit. Affiliate links are easier to market that way, and it caters to people's self interest. Try stirring s*** up and see what happens.
I gots to agree...10k hits a day = about $2-$4 for me >< I'd move all my ads to yahoo publisher, but their ads can't keep up with the traffic, or they error out or something
Even Yahoo's inventory was large enough to constantly fill your site with ads, the same problem would occur. Viking is right, the problem is more ad-blindness in general.
Don't cry ! Try something else. Sometimes on community sites even donations work better than adsense It is not all crappy MFA sites fault you earn nothing with your quality website
about 1 out of every 600 pageviews results in someone clicking on a sponsored link... so only one in 600 pageviews someone finds that an advertisement may lead them in the right direction. Thats not so bad... consider someone driving down some street... they see something that interests them in the distance and they end up going there instead of back home. Nothing's wrong with a little adventure ... I only use impressions though... I haven't been using Adsense since at least 3 years... ..its been a while... I made $4,500 on one site in less than a month that was about a month old.. then I was like 0_o ...and decided to move on to other ventures.. so, I only use impressions now... however, there are some high quality sites that use adsense.. runescape.com uses it.. I've seen them on mapquest, on neopets, myspace, ...they're on a lot of sites.. its not for bad content lamely pages. And peeps don't forget about the ads.. they just tend to use them more effectively.. they're hitting more pages on the target site... so eventually they'll hit more ads if you have a big enough visitor base.. you're not losing with clean informative content... you're winning! And those visitors will come back again and again b/c you really have something worth their while... you'll make more in the short run and you'll make exponentially more in the long term..
Yeah, i think this what really happens. Only MFA site with more or less content is finding succes with adsense at the moment.
Nonsense. Check some of top sites worldwide and you'll see many of them with Adsense ads and performing well. Adsense (and others targeted ads) work pretty well in 75% of sites, not mfa sites, but solid sites. If you have a crappy blog, witch is read by some guys, friends, but not SERP targeted, then your income is low. IF you have a automobile site, SERP targeted visitors, and you provide them 95% of what they expect, and leave 5% into Adsense, you see, your income is huge (30%+CTR) and your traffic is awesome. At least works for me. Anyways, to say that only MFA sites are making $$$ is nonsense, and pretty much a statement that you cannot get around some issue on your sites. Get my point?