Tim Bray details his experience with using Google AdSense on his blog. He’s making some money… of course, he was well known prior to blogging, and he’s earned a solid readership with his blog. The interesting points to me are:
- Google knows his traffic, down to the individual page level. He finds this useful, since he’s got a traffic counter which filters out spiders, robots, etc., as a side-effect of the revenue. I think it’s more troublesome if you’re a commercial website to share details at this level of granularity. But maybe we really are headed to a transparent society.
- Fascinating how controlling the terms and conditions are… Bray wrote very carefully to avoid crossing any lines while still sharing interesting info.
- There is even less incentive to put full posts into his RSS feed, since the ads aren’t there.
- You always need new material, both because clicks level out and (interesting) new readers click Google ads more than long-time readers.
When people first see the Google ads, quite a few click on them. Then, as time goes by and repeat visitors have seen them before, the click-through rate and the revenue fall off; but interestingly, after a few days the click-through rate stops declining and levels out.
That last point lingers… have even text ads started, ever so slightly, to reach saturation? Everyone on the web has some form of ‘banner blindness,’ where you’ve been trained to consider graphics as possible ads first, information second. The Google AdSense display code is malleable to your site, but it’s also easy enough to recognize after you’ve seen a few iterations. Are we all learning to ignore it already? Even if, as Google hopes, the ads are contextually relevant? Something to watch.