Hello all, I came across this site while researching the Google AdSense program and just wanted to share my experience. I operate two blogs, in unconventional ways. My first blog had around 900 daily page impressions when I decided to try out AdSense. The blog is updated daily and has minimal text content. Instead it focuses on videos and images of mostly video games, tv clips, art work, hot women, and any other interesting content. I flooded the blog with several AdSense blocks, a little too many because 2 or 3 of them would not even show. I tried to have all of them blend into the site rather than stand out. Due to the near random entries of the post content, I noticed many of the results were highly off topic. I thought this was going to be a major problem. Although as i checked AdSense every few hours or so, I was shocked at how much money I was generating from clicks. I would say anywhere from around 20 to 35 cents. At the end of the day I averaged 19 cents a click for a total of $24. Again, I was shocked! Not bad for the first day. I started doing more research on AdSense and perhaps followed some bad advice (Quality ad space over Quantity). I removed most of my AdSense blocks and kept a 250x300 rectangle, image-only skyscraper, and another small box on top. My revenue has since fallen, even with nearly 200 more page impressions. I average around 14 cents a click tough. My first instinct is to return my blog to the way I had it before. I just wanted to share my experience so far to get some advice. I would not want to make the situation worse because it's still not bad right now bringing in $10 a day. Since my ads are completely off topic ("pimp your MySpace", videos from XYZ, even other blogs), I found a neat little code on these forums which should focus AdSense to the relevant content of each blog post, even though it's just a few sentences long. I'm about to start testing the code on future blog posts. Another explanation is my page visitors decided to check out the ads the first day they showed up and are now slowly starting to ignore them. My second blog was a work-in-progress and is used more like a website for reference. After my success with monitorizing my first blog, I added two small AdSense text blogs. Traffic is relevant to a niche group of people and as a result it only 30 hits a day. It's around 11 cents a click. It's also far more text intense than my other blog. Ads are highly relevant. I'm still waiting for better results, but it looks like it may not be successful as originally planned. This is what has me confused. How does a minimal text content blog with nearly random Ads do better than one with tons of original content and highly relevant ads? AdSense is a lot more lucrative than I had ever imagined, but it seems to be a game of traffic and flooding every square inch with ads. This is my first impressions anyway. I'm almost tempted to abandon my second blog and just put all my energy into increasing traffic of the first, which is already growing at a rapid pace. It's also very low maintinance. Just some thoughts, -The Guy
I don't pretend to know the answers to all your questions and concerns but I can tell you from experience that there is a lot of variability in Adsense -- from day to day, from site to site, from page to page, from ad block to ad block -- that it's probably not wise to try to draw firm conclusions based on the data you've seen so far. Wait a while longer and do more experimenting. The "science" of Adsense is pretty complex, which makes it difficult to come to simple conclusions about it. It's probably true that, if you get repeat visitors to your blog, they tend to get "ad blind" and don't click ads as often as they did in the beginning. It's also true that, by having more ad blocks on a site that doesn't have a tighly focused theme, there's a better chance that at least one of the ads will relate to something in the content that your visitors will be interested in.