Adsense Earnings Low? Here’s Why
Browsing through some internet marketing forums I frequent, and reading some other blogs, one thing is painfully clear. Adsense earnings seem to be down across the board. People are bitching about it left and right. I’m glad it’s not just me. At first, I thought I got smartpriced but I don’t think that’s quite the case.
A while back, Adsense changed their ad unit format so that the entire ad unit was no longer clickable. Now, just the actual title and url link in the ad can be clicked. The entire middle “content/description” portion of the ad is no longer clickable. I have a feeling this one little change is the biggest factor in lowering alot of publishers’ CTRs.
Another thing that irritates me about Adsense at the moment is those little arrows they decided to put on every ad unit. While they’re not overly intrusive, they basically make your nicely blended adsense unit appear more like an ad. In the event someone actually decides to use the arrows to browse more ads (I have no idea why anyone would), they sure as hell aren’t scrolling over into more expensive ads. The first ad shown will most likely always get you the highest paying click — so, in theory, the more someone scrolls, the less you’re likely to earn when they do click.
After these incredibly stupid changes were made, the sites I did have making a few bucks per day with Adsense are now only making a dollar or so. I figure sooner or later Adsense will change these things back when they realize it’s hurting their bottom line, but in the meantime, publishers will remain frustrated with their lowered Adsense revenues.
You’d think a company that earns a majority of their revenue through their Adsense/Adwords advertising platform would think about these things in more detail before they go into effect. After all, they earn money from every click - just like we do.
File Swap Marketing?
I was surfing the net earlier today when I stumbled upon an interesting site. I’m not going to directly link it here (you’ll see why in a second), but the URL is file-swap [dot] com. Basically, it’s a site where you can choose a file (picture, PDF, text file) on your computer and “swap” it for a random file from another user. You upload your file (up to 500k), and view a random file from another person. Pretty simple concept.
Anyway, I got an idea of a simple way you could potentially use it as a small traffic generator, or possibly even indirectly monetize it. As a quick side note though, I don’t think this site has enough of a userbase of people swapping files to really make this profitable or push much traffic, so this is just more of an idea rather than something you should actually try.
First of all, you could do one of the following…
1. Write a crappy ebook about anything you want. Stuff it with aff links. Give it some catchy title that would make people want to read it.
2. Watermark your URL onto a funny picture.
3. Even simply type your URL and save it as a text file. You never know, someone might get curious and check it out.
Next, Automate the swap…
(I’m not a coder by any means, but I am guessing this would be pretty basic)
Now that you have this watermarked file or ebook or whatever, just write a script that “swaps” your file automatically every 5-10 minutes or so. I figure any more “swaps” than that and you might set off some flags, given the size of the site.
Also, if you uploaded “yourfile.jpg”, you can’t upload that same file again. Since you cannot upload the same file name twice, make sure your script alters your file name to a unique name each time you swap.
There are no captchas on the site that I encountered. So, just make sure the script discards whatever crap you get back in the swap, and just let it run.
Alrite, that’s all for today. I hope somebody found this rambling useful. 