Jim at Reve News has learned the lesson that most bloggers writing about making money from blogs has learned – Adsense doesn’t pay well on these types of blogs.

‘On ReveNews that is. Let this be a lesson to the other publishers out there. Never try to run Adsense on a site that is read by people who are Adsense experts, let alone a site read by affiliate marketers. Geez, talk about a pathetic click rate. I haven’t seen something fail so badly since Gigli.

Putting Adsense into our content was an experiment by me to see if it could work for us, even though I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t, I had to find out. I’ve learned my lesson and have removed 98% of all the Google ads off of the sit’

If you want to make big money via Adsense I’d pick another topic – readers of such blogs are remarkably blind to Adsense ads and the ads themselves are notoriously poorly paying.

Jim also gives a case study of a ‘typical blogger using adsense’ in his post where he shows how little the average blogger will earn using Adsense. His figures talk hypothetically of a blogger with 1000 impressions per day, with a 10% CTR and a 2 cents per click payment earning $730 per year.

Nothing wrong with the maths – the only problem is that there is such variation between blogs on almost every element of the equation. CTR can vary widely – but 10% is probably an over estimation looking at most of my blogs. 2 cents per click is an estimate that varies widely also (it’s probably an under estimate looking at my blogs).

For example – I’ve got a few blogs that hit the 1000 impressions per day mark. [Read more...]

I’m interested to see today that there are a number of threads at Webmaster World’s forums that seem to be reporting poor earnings by Adsense publishers over the past few days. (for example here, here and here).

These sorts of threads appear all year around of course but particularly at this time of the year. In fact I’ve had a number of emails and IM’s from people today expressing concern about their Adsense earnings. Why are they down? I’d say it’s for a number of reason:

1. Summer – Whilst I’m currently shivering down here in Melbourne, the Northern Hemisphere is into Summer which is traditionally a flat patch for many websites. People are traveling and enjoying the great outdoors. Until we work out a way to get them surfing the web more whilst sunbathing, swimming, playing golf etc – many sites will have to put up with a little less traffic. Of course for some sites summer is peak time. I imagine travel sites, sports equipment sites etc would be doing ok.

In addition to lower traffic levels – many believe that advertisers decrease the amount they are willing to pay per click at this time of year as a result of the summer holidays. In fact my traffic levels are not too bad at the moment – fairly stable – it’s mainly a decrease in earnings per click that are bringing my overall earnings down (check out this thread for more summer holiday theories and information).

2. 4th of July – a fairly significant proportion of the web surfing market in North America had a long weekend. This always has an impact.

3. London Bombings – a number of bloggers and websites are reporting decreases in earnings today with lower CTR and traffic in some cases. This is understandable. I suspect web usage would be high at the moment (BBC’s site crashed and many others were very slow last night here) but most people were not searching for the type of information that they are normally looking for. Understandable.

My advice – take a ‘blogging as normal’ type approach. In fact while everyone else is on holidays either join them or work doubly hard on your blog so that you reap the rewards in the months ahead. Oh and remember that the Pre-Christmas rush is less than 6 months away!

There is an interesting thread going on over at Webmaster World titled How much is an AdSense website worth? The discussion revolves around selling websites and determining what price is fair.

It’s interesting to see the variety of approaches people take to determining a site’s worth. The dominate theory seems to be its worth up to a year’s earnings (there is a wild variety of opinions on this ranging from 3 months income to 50 months income on this) but others consider a variety of other factors including how many pages of content there are, page rank, history of the site, incoming links, current site growth levels, originality of content, domain name etc.

I predict that these issues will become increasingly pertinent to bloggers in the next 12 months as we see more and more blogs selling. Hopefully some norms will emerge to help those of us in the selling market make good decisions.