In the 1990s, it was very difficult to get any kind of compensation for developing content and putting it on the Internet. That’s presumably how we ended up with an Internet that is 99 percent spam, porn, and catalog shopping. I never liked banner ads and did not place them on any site that I controlled because the ads were so poorly targeted. It seemed like a waste of everyone’s time and energy when the chance of the reader being interested was so low and therefore the chance of a clickthrough was minimal. Sure enough, ad rates that had been reasonably high in the 1990s fell to the point that even very popular sites couldn’t get serious money from banner advertising by 2002.
A friend convinced me that perhaps it was time to give Google Ads a try. The ads are targeted by looking at the words on the page where they appear. The ads are text, so they’re not graphically obnoxious. I started my experiment by adding Google ads into the bulletin board pages at http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/ . This is a server that suffered a database meltdown six months ago. Nobody is going there to post anymore. I had planned to throw the machine out. Google’s terms prohibit me from writing about the clickthrough rate, but not the bottom line. After about 10 days, it seems that the ads are bringing in a steady $60 per day or nearly $20,000 per year. Encouraged, I put some ads into a few of the pages at http://philip.greenspun.com, including the materialism, flying, and aquarium subdirectories. These bring in another $20-30 per day and the click through rates are high enough that I don’t feel too embarrassed for wasting screen space and reader attention.
Could it be that we are going to enter a golden age of content, fueled by the Google Ads team?
Synchronicity! Joel Spolsky discusses AdWords fraud: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/24.html
At $20k/year you should have your fancy turbine powered helicopter in roughly five centuries!
“My new personal Web server cost $500,000 and eats up $38,000/year in a hardware maintenance contract” — Philip, on December 13, 1997
Better targeted advertising is one side of the equation. Cost of operating a web server asymptotically approaching zero is the other.
Wow — that’s amazing, and encouraging. I’m glad it will keep your site alive. Though I am sad to see ads anywhere, google ads are quite unobtrusive. It’s amazing that someone could theoretically live off this, though of course you do have amazingly high readership for a web-developer without celebrities or porn, so perhaps there aren’t many people who could make $20k / year (times two). Nonetheless, I am shocked by the amount of money involved. Does this mean any potential for increased postings from you, of more postings = more hits = more money for helicopter fund?
Branimir: Excellent point on keeping costs low. Though I fear that online communities may suffer to some extent if people optimize for minimum cost. There is a lot less customer service and software maintenance/spam proofing involved in writing a static .html page than in offering a lot of user-to-user interaction.
Alex, Michael: You rightly point out that the amounts are small compared to what it takes to live comfortably in the Boston area. On the other hand, if you compare this to what print magazines pay writers it is pretty darn good. For me, assuming I decide to continue using the ads, I’m not sure that it will make a big difference in motivation. On the other hand it might stop my friends and family laughing at me for the effort that I put into the site(s).
Phil: did you choose the per-click or per-1000-impressions method?
Trevis: I was not aware that there was a choice. As far as I know, Google (and their advertisers) only pays when someone clicks. You could have 100 million impressions and not get paid if no reader is ever tempted by an ad.
Philip, as far as I know, sites with a certain threshold of traffic get assigned an account manager from Google, and can negotiate receiving an amount per 1000 impressions, usually in the neighborhood of $1.
I’d be curious to get an idea of how many hits per day earn you $60/day in Adsense revenue.
Philip: I read on the Google Adsense web site that there web content providers could choose between the two. I just signed up for Google Adsense today (been deliberating, but finally did it after reading about your experience), so I have no first-hand accounts to share about this matter yet…
Philip, glad to hear that AdSense is working out for you. In many ways, AdSense is built exactly for sites like yours- good content and high relevancy in search results. Please keep us updated on the numbers if they go up/down, etc.
Philip, I am curious to know how many page impressions it took to get to thet $60 a day.
I’m going to start ‘clicking’ like crazy. Phil you may have your Ranger helicopter sooner than later. 😉 I think this Google scam will not last too much longer.
Is it really a scam? Is clicking on Google Ads without buying anything (or even, without the intention of buying anything) that different from watching but ignoring television commercials?
I don’t know how many commercials I’ve seen on TV (thousands? tens of thousands?), but it’s probably been on the order of ten times that I’ve actually bought something because I saw it on the commercial. I don’t see Google Ads being much different.
Nice, until they cut you off for no obvious reason, lock your account so that you can’t see what happened, send you an email telling you all the money you earned in the last month is being returned to advertisers and not telling you why any of it happened “due to the proprietary nature of our algorithm”.Been there.
I’m pleased with the results so far. Not as high as Phil’s yet, but my personal web site is pretty new, presently has a tiny readership, and I don’t have a lot of content on there yet. (Excuses, excuses…) 🙂
To Phil’s original point, I for one feel quite inspired to spend time developing quality web content with the prospect of being reimbursed through decent web advertising.
There will be an explosion of content but it won’t be because of ads. Content will become a service that is subscription-supported, just like software is trying to become. The barrier right now is a serviceable system of micropayments that makes it easy for people to pay for content. Once that happens, advertising will fade away to the ghettoes where people can’t afford to pay for content.
Yeah………. No doubt content is KING, not only these schemes, search engines lays emphasis on content for SEO purposes…. visit me http://www.dewinfotech.com
Ajay – I really think it’s highly unlikely that a content explosion will ever be enabled by micropayments. Consider that there will always be a plethora of sites offering free content, content which is often highly interesting. Moreover, people are starting to look to sites like http://www.reddit.com and http://www.digg.com to get their news – sites that require subscriptions naturally don’t end up with high rankings on such sites. And those sites are what people are talking about – subscription sites are not in the discussion.
Paul Graham, in his essay at http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html, says “Don’t Maltreat Users.” The key idea behind text-based ads is that they are indeed actually useful, sometimes. Users don’t hate ads, but they certainly hate paying for stuff.