Google Adsense takes a large amount of money from top earners?

Google Adsense is very difficult to make big money from! Only the big big big sites will make over $500 a day, I read somewhere that the dating site Plentyoffish removed google adsense because they said they were not making much compared to what they should be making if they ran their own ad network and selling ad space...

POF was earning $10 million a year from adsense and they have some of the highest traffic in the world and ranked 335 on Alexa with the average visitor spending a total of 21 minutes per visit, but only earn $10 million? Plenty of fish should be earning at least $100 million or more from ads, but google gets a certain percentage of each ad click, so I can see why they started using their own ad network so they can get the money the deserve.

Huffingtonpost was reported to be making around $30 million a year before they sold to AOL for over $300 million, and they are ranked 116 on Alexa. So Google really must be taking a large chunk of the money?

I think the average amount and realistic amount a person who runs a blog can earn from Adsense is $5,000 to $12,000 a year in earnings if you can earn that much or more then you are a success in my eyes.

 

Well from rank 116 to rank 335 on Alexa there's a world in terms of traffic! So from $30 a year to $10 it's only 3 times less. Perhaps the traffic is also 3 times less.. ?
But why plentyoffish can move to their own ad network is like facebook, because they can provide geotargetted AND detailled profiled ads to advertizers which sells at a higher price. Plus of course they'll cut Google's share but you also have to include the costs of their own ad network as well, staff and other things.

So of course if your site gets below Alexa 500 you surely should think about cutting off adsense's share, but in the meantime, it's hassle free to use adsense and other ad network so you don't have to bother about anything else than increasing your traffic.
I made more than what you mention in your post in 2010 with adsense, but it is my record year and so not representative of previous years earnings especially as I don't have just a blog.

I think for adsense what is needed first is TRAFFIC and then by running A/B testing on ad placement you can increase your eCPM until optimisation is complete. Maybe that's what many bloggers should look into before saying adsense doesn't pay well enough, they're leaving money on the table by not optimising their eCPM.

 

Of course, you're using its network - who knows what the cut is, but Google gets it share too.
Especially if your site gets smartpriced

 

Also I've read something from plentyoffish owner that he was pissed off when adsense changed the way text ads are clickable (before it was all the area, now it's only title and url) and his CTR and earnings went down a lot from one day to the next.

 

I agree with one difference. It's not related to the google's share..

Direct ads can pay more than adsense if the site owner removes adsense. Because the advertisers will have to buy ads directly and they can't analyze the conversions better than adwords. They simply have to pay what is asked by the publisher when adwords is not an option. The share of google is not a big deal for advertisers considering to the commercial value created by adwords.

Here, this site, DP forums might be another example of how adsense has gotten worse for publishers since DP is also good at Alexa ranking. DP had only adsense ads when I signed up 5 years ago. All the members who have more than 50 posts were receiving 50% of the total adsense revenue created at DP. There was a box at our DP settings page to enter our adsense pub-xxx codes. Eventually adwords has created the conversion system, we had some financial crisis then adsense became like a tool of wasting of traffic for almost all of the sites with high traffic. First, we lost our 50% ad revenue shares here, then we have started to see the links to buy ads from DP directly, maybe ads by different ad networks, etc. I just told all these to give an example not to criticize the past actions of DP. I couldn't make more than $5 from that old revenue share program and as an internet user I don't care the ads too much.

 

Very true, I think smaller bloggers earned more money in the earlier years of Adsense because the ads were new, now more and more people are used to seeing the Adsense ads and will be blind to them and not click.

So basically it is more secure to start ones own Ad network or sell ad space because you are secured money, unlike with Adsense some people can get 50,000 visits in one day and only make 100 dollars. With Adsense it is not reliable because it is not a FOR SURE thing that someone who visits will click your ads. With selling yoru own ad space, you are guaranteed money regardless of clicks.

There are some sites that aren't even rank in 500 or 1000 and they make around $1-5 million a year on adsense. But I think the more people get used to the Adsense advertisements the least likely those people will earn.

 

It is the problem of finding or tapping into that advertisers market to project yourself as a potential platform for them plus managing the advertisements, rates etc which are much more problematic to a publisher which google manages perfectly for you but the share that they claim from you for that is contentious, but then we dont have a better alternative.

 

Wait a minute so DP was allowing revenue share? I don't get it, please explain further, isn't that against TOS of adsense publisher usage?

Also if you do your own ad network you don't have to remove Adsense?, I see DP has some adsense ads when they did that, you just have to sell a spot and put rotating ads and in text ads, like they can buy a word.

I think if you have a lot of traffic you will actually earn more selling ad space, but its good to include at least 1 or 2 google adsense to maximize earnings, so you get combined revenue, But is it illegal to have Adsense with other advertisers?

 

Well PPc just generally doesn't pay high overall. There are some other programs that can pay higher than Adsense (If I remember right, I don't use Adsense). But yeah it's better than nothing.

 

Yes, good points! The revenue benefit doing your own direct ad network is great! but the work to do it is hard, you will have to work very hard to search for advertisers and sell them on why they should advertise on your site, and come up with price range and rates etc.

But Google Adsense takes too much money from the earnings. I don't know how much percentage they take but it seems like a lot, especially for bigger websites.

Wasn't Microsoft Bing supposed to come up with a strong competitor to compete with google adsense??? so far only Adsense pays the best, Yahoo publisher network sucks and almost all other Pay per click sites pay low.

Vibrant Media intext ads used to pay a lot, they were second to adsense in my eyes, but recently they only post one text ad on my site, and now before I was getting paid a couple of dollars a day, now I only get paid 5 to 25 cents because they stopped putting multiple intext ads.

 

Isn't Smart Pricing a myth? I kept reading up on that and a lot of people said it wasn't true, it's just advertisers are paying less per click now because of the economy.

 

Well, adsense said their share is about 32%, publishers get on average 68% of what advertisers pay. Probably premium publishers get a better share. So let's say that 30% of what advertizers pay goes in adsense/google pocket. With that they need to support the cost of supporting advertizers, their interface developpement and the cost of an ad server. Personally if I was earning $2M and I would think $1Million is going to Google in exchange for their advertizers pool and ad servers, I'm not sure I would go to the trouble of developing my own ad network and hiring staff to keep it running.
What happens is when webmasters in this situation (in which I'm far from) start to think that instead of earning $2Millions and letting $1M in google's pocket they could pay $1M to run their own ad network and earn $4M not $2 since they'll be able to make the prices and not rely on adsense's bidding system. At this point it becomes a tempting choice.
I'm happy the way it is for me right now, at least I don't have to think about that

 

Very good points James.

Adsense saves the hassle. But the only thing is it's not a for sure thing or reliable source of income, because you have to rely on people clicking your ads to get paid and its not a guarantee that people will click enough ads for you to make over 100 dollars that day. And what I notice is most ads pay only 2 cents sometimes.

Also you are correct, you will have to pay more people and take a deep loss in your pockets to hire multiple people to workd the ad networks and call up companies to sell adspace etc. Workers like that don't come cheap either I would say $30-40 k or more salary.

 

Well, I've been with adsense since pretty much the beginning and I know think of adsense as an average $5 CPM.
So based also on average pageviews/unique visitors that I think of traffic needed at about 13,000 unique visitors a day to get $100. From that it can be a little less, a little more.
Of course this doesn't work for very low niches and very high ones, but for most of general niches with good ad placement, we can take $5 CPM as a good base, if you fail on having good ad placement and/or choosing an average niche for CPC, then the average CPM will be less.

 

I don't want to tell how adsense is the best. I don't really care them as I am not the owner of google. It's just a commercial company for me. What I want tell is that adwords creates a benefit for the advertisers and advertisers keep feeding the publishers through adwords/adsense. They have the biggest publishers/advertisers portfolio.

Revenue sharing is allowed by adsense as long as you don't display the ads of different publishers at the same web page. You can have unlimited different publishers on a domain but not on an individual URL.

You can sell PPC ads directly. It's just a type of online advertisements like CPA, CPM, text links, etc. Adsense has nothing to do if PPC doesn't pay well.

Adsense takes 32% from the publishers which is approximately 1/3. They give 2 times of what they take. Do you know that tla and some other ad networks take 50% ? adbrite takes 30%, bidvertisers and most of the others take 40% or more. There are really a few reliable networks that take less than 30%.

 

I'd just like to correct you on this. That's what I'm doing since 2006.

 

In the old Adsense interface it shows the publisher's revenue share. Click on the My Account tab and go to the bottom.

 

I developed a site years ago when revenue sharing was a fresh concept. It's one of my big mistakes to sell that site early. I am sure that the buyer is now much more happier than me. Whenever I check my baby at alexa I want to cry. I had to keep it for at least 1 more year.

 

Adbrite takes on 30%? I've never used them before because I heard they don't do direct deposits and only pay through mailed check. I like getting direct deposits.

Does Adbrite pay good? Bidvertiser is CRAP! everytime I see that name I cringe, that PPC is bull, I did a test, I was getting high clicks on my adsense so I replaced every single adsense ad with Bidvertiser ads for a couple of weeks, same placement and I got only 25 cents earned.

I've used Chitika but its only seen through searches and by US Canadian markets. It didn't pay that well.

The other ones I used were in text ads, Vibrant, Kontera and Infolinks, of those 3 Vibrant paid the best! Kontera sucked and so did Infolinks they paid very little per click.

Vibrant doesn't pay good anymore because they stopped putting a lot of ad links on a page now they only put 1 intext ad and that means less clicks.

 

Awesome! info, I checked and it says this AdSense for Content: 68 % publisher revenue share