I am really thinking that the business model of just adsense sites is outdated. I think the idea, is to have something else selling on your site, be it your own product or cpa offers...is just to hard to make money just from adCENTS>
I agree. With adsense's diminishing returns and a more web savoy population using the internet any money being made through this program amounts to little more than pocket change. I've had much better luck with affiliate advertising with a carefully placed link here and there.
Yeah, my biggest problem I guess is that the ads appearing on my sites aren't closely related to the content. For example, I have a mini-niche site which is based on a long-tail keyword that has a search volume of approximately 2000 searches a month. My site is at the 8th spot on the first page of google for that keyword and I get 5-10 unique visitors every day. That's obviously a very small amount but almost 80 % of the visitors visit my site while searching for that main long-tail keyword so the traffic is very targeted. And nobody is clicking on the ads! The placement is great but the ads don't contain the main keyword. Yeah, they are related to the niche but I guess that's not enough. I'm not sure though because I heard someone say that you must get to at least the 3rd place on google search results if you want to earn with adsense.