On most small blogs I've seen (<500-1000 uniques per day) they use adsense ads in the prime locations (middle and top right of front page). For larger blogs it seems like they all sell ad units in these spots instead of using adsense or another ad program. I wonder what the number of daily uniques has to be per day before it starts becoming more profitable to sell ad units than to use adsense? For example john chow's blog he sell the 6 ad buttons on front page for $250 per month each.
The larger sites have usually gone through their adsense phase and figured out that the fact is in many niches Adsense just doesn't pay much per click. You get $0.10 to have someone leave your site so it really isn't worth it. With a paid placements you know how much you are getting paid monthly. You could start off charging a low amount for paid placements to see how well they do and then adjust your prices to fit.
yeah that sounds about right- would be nice to have a guaranteed monthly income from paid ads- i had to use the google ad filter to ban some url's (swoopo) because it was the only ad they were showing 24 hours per day and I was getting like .10 per click. I banned this domain and all is normal now
How do you deal with the whole Google and selling links issue? I doubt most people run as nofollow for the sake of them.
I agree with HomeComputerGames, however another explanation is that tech/webmaster related niches just get horrible CTR so sites can make much more money by selling monthly ads to webmaster-related products or services such as "wordpress themes" or "seo services" and what not. Most popular ad manager right now seems to be buysellads.com. @Ryan: If you want to sell links, you better not say so publically. You can sell them on DP or other forums etc.
Arghhh I see, makes sense. Do you think there's any major difference in paid reviews, as I see many webmasters offering these at the moment. Just curious myself, not actively on the prowl to buy or sell links lol.
I think the literal interpretation of Google's policy is that paid links are bad, but realistically the difference between a paid link and an ad is..... ? The SPIRIT of what Google wants to do with reporting/banning paid links is when you see ridiculous things like a high pr real estate site with gambling and viagra links in their footer. For this reason relevance is a good thing to look for in advertising placements of many kinds (also because it just makes sense that you'll get more visits if you advertise on a relevant site.)