I am SOOO sick of Adsense. In fact, the daily flux of google payout is enough to want me to start contacting advertisers (my own) and getting people to pay me directly. I was really happy w/ Google through about August of this year. There seemed to be a pattern, I knew if I had x number of visitors I'd make about x amount of money. If I increased visitors, or clicks... I'd make more money. SIMPLE. But, since mid-end of August... there is no such thing. Since then... the money I make on a daily basis can vary by $100, with the same click through rate, same visitors, same clicks. I have done everything I can to improve my CTR and I have increased it by about 1/2 a percent. You'd think I'd be doing a lot better. But NO... I make less w/ each passing month. Chitcka, has yet to pay me any money so I really don't know if they are legit at this point. I was offered an option by a company for them to manage my ads, but at the time (pre-August) I was doing much better and passed on the offer. Now Im thinking... hmmm... that may not be such a bad idea. I really like the text-based ad model. My site users like it too. Going with graphic ads may not be the most ideal, but the $$$ is important. I need consistency (with a % of daily flux) to run a business. I can't run a business on some "magic" dice that Google rolled for me today. Am I alone in these thoughts?
There are probably other webmasters who feel rather adrift when it comes to Adsense earnings, however, I can assure you that contacting the advertisers on your own would guarantee your earnings = 0.
it feels like carrot and donkey my traffic grows rapidly each month while adsense goes down definitely some cuts going on
If you have the traffic, I would definitely contact advertisers on your own. I've done that and half of my ad revenue now comes from my own ad sales. It does take a bit more work, though.
You can still contact advertisers and start your own program. Just don't focus on targeting the ones that are on the ads now. In general, you can make more money without adsense using this method, but you will need to plan on it taking more personal time to manage.
I have trouble getting relevent ads with YPN, I would switch in a second if I got ads that made sense for my sites.
Even if YPN is paying a lot now, don't count on it after beta. It could be more or less after beta, only thing I'd bet on is that payout will change from what it is now. More advertisers, more publishers, Yahoo trying to take market share from Google. It seems to point to higher payouts than Google, but that's only if they can get the same advertisers and match Google's accurate ad-matching technology.
I think it has more to do with shareholders looking at there returns,maybe google have dropped the % of money paid to advertisers in a bid to increase profits ?
I tried using Y!PN, but the CTR was so low it wasn't worth keeping. I get nearly a 1200% times higher CTR with AdSense than I did with Y!PN. The payout was great for Y!PN for the beta period, which I believe is still going on, but it just wasn't worth it. My code of ethics as a webmaster tells me to put ads on my site that people will click so they aren't annoyed by the ads. So when I have relevent ads that people like and click on, it actually will help them and attract them to come back rather than be turned away by the non-relevant ads. Even using contextual ads by Y!PN was getting a low CTR. They don't have enough of a grasp on the program yet for it to be entirely effective.
I got YPN invite but then I don't live in USA so it is still sitting in my inbox. I would also like to give a try but after all my adsense works fine. I am not too greedy about money that it earns. After all it earns, that's the main point.
That would be my guess, as G stock is trading @ about 47 times their projected earnings, which is not healthy for any stock. AmCy
I think the smart-pricing thing really pisses everyone off. As our sites got noticed, hence more visitors, and more clicks, you would expect the daily income to commeasurate with the increase. But it doesn't. My own example (month-on-month basis): visitor +46%, impressions +45%, average clicks +60%, BUT income only +54%. It may look fine, but to be honest, I'm sick of < 0.05 cent clicks