Is AdSense Dying?

[Shawn Gossman]

How do you feel about Google AdSense as a way to make money with blog content?

Once upon a time, AdSense was a preferred way to earn revenue with a blog. Nowadays, a lot of people run ad blockers. Even Google (who owns AdSense) says AdSense can slow your blog down and give it a lower rank in SEO because of that,

And who knows what AI is doing to it.

What do you think? Is AdSense dead or is it dying as a form of earning revenue with a blog?

 

[frm]

Advertising really died when they changed from CPM to CPC.

The days of $3 (my low-tier account) to $13 CPM ($3-13 per 1000 impressions) were the best, especially with a text-based game where a player would load hundreds of pages per day. Of course, there were clicks, but the money was in just the ad appearing.

You really need to A/B optimize with AdSense to see where the most popular placement is for your audience. You can refine it to get your CTR up by blending it or putting an ad in where the eyes would naturally go. It surely makes it harder as there's no one-size-fits-all placement with blog posts since, for the most part, blogs need imagery to go along with it. If you put an ad where an image should be, it might detract a user, but you could place it somewhere else, and get a higher CTR from that placement while not compromising their user experience, whether interested in the ad or not.

Auto-ads and Google vignette are the worst for UI, but may pay more. If I move my mouse on a page and #google_vignette shows up as an overlay, I instantly click off and may not ever return.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Auto-ads and Google vignette are the worst for UI, but may pay more. If I move my mouse on a page and #google_vignette shows up as an overlay, I instantly click off and may not ever return.

Yeah, those do pay a lot but they're about as annoying as popups were back in the day.

I experiment with using them on my blogs. I still get a lot of traffic on one of my blogs (300,000+ views a month) where I have it enabled but it makes me feel bad to have it there.

It's almost like enabling popups.