Devil Works

Can summarise the changes to Google Adsense for me ?

I get presented with a really long page with all the terms and conditions and all I really want to know is what has changed since the last time.

I’ll keep taking the skip option until I don’t have a choice. Though I have plenty of time. Changes don’t start till the 28th May.

After the first couple of months I stopped reading the adsense optimisation tips that Google automatically sends me each month.

The main reason is that unless your very new to creating websites for money making purposes then they haven’t anything new to tell you.

The other reason is that Google wouldn’t think for a second that there is better ways to make money than stacking your sites with Google products.

I have a funny feeling that the whole idea of killing pagerank for sites selling text links is so that people replace them with Google inventory.

Here’s some of the clever tips that Google provided me this month

Adsense for Search adds both functionality and revenue to your site.
You are not currently using Adsense for Search on your sites.

Okay, I agree to this one, but in the past when I’ve used Adsense for search the revenue has been tiny. So I haven’t bothered to replace the code when I’ve changed themes. If I was getting 10,000 hits a day I may reconsider my position on this one.

Referrals can add incremental revenue to your site.
You are not currently using Referrals on your sites.

Google recently reduced payouts on referrals by massive amounts, I won’t waste my time for the pittance they are offering.

Placing more than one ad unit on a page often generates more revenue.
Many of your sites only contain one ad unit.

I know this, it’s obvious. Though doubling the number of ad units on a page doesn’t always mean double the revenue. I have one site that has a link bar at the top then 3 decent size ad blocks throughout the template. 95% of my Google revenue on that site comes from the link bar.

I know it doesn’t pay to bite the hand that feeds you, but it also doesn’t hurt to check the source and quality of the food before you eat it !

I wouldn’t wish this fate upon anyone, but I wonder if it’s something he’s considered….

Markus Frind runs a fairly large dating site that rivals many of the big players in the industry with hundreds of employee’s. He does this all from his apartement with a handful of servers.

Markus is quite rightly proud of his efforts. Pretty much on his own he has built one of the biggest dating sites on the net. Yet he does it mostly on his own, He has no employee’s and enjoyed the limelight for a while when he stated he was earning $10,000 a day from adsense alone.

Marcus’s latest post ponders the state of the industry

You know your business model has serious problems when your biggest competitor in the English speaking world is run by one person out of his apartment.

He’s built a great business but what would happen if he was out of action for a couple of months or longer?

Like most websites they would run fine for a little while until something went wrong, then they would slowly fall apart.

A few years back when I was running a heap of affiliate sites, I had a joint project with a guy that lived in another state. Hosting was expensive back then and we used the joint project to fund our dedicated server which hosted all our sites.

Sadly he was hit by a rare varient of the flu, he went to the shops one day and never came back. His wife, who I’d never spoken to before gave me a call to let me know what happened. Between us we managed to keep his sites online while they were still profitable which helped ease the burden but I didn’t have the time to run and manage them on top of my own workload. Within 12 months they weren’t covering there expenses and we made the decision to pull the plug.

It’s a sad story on so many levels, but on a business level he had an internet business that was pulling in a healthy 6 figures a year, and within 12 months it was gone because there were no plans in place for his business without him.

Where do you think Markus’s site would be without him there to run it ?

What would happen to your business if you were forced offline for a month or two ?

As I thought, Google didn’t like John Chow’s efforts at blending his Google adsesnse ads. He recieved an email today asking him to change the way he presents his google links within 72 hours.

John is a largish client of adsense, doing 4 or 5 figures a month I guess. It makes me wonder what would happen if a smaller client, say doing three figures a month, did the same thing. Would they get 72 hours to fix the error of their ways or would they be given the boot without a second chance ?

The other issue to ponder is did Google notice this by spidering the site, or was it all the publicity the site got with his recent digg-a-thon ?