I think pcunix is right – I could probably optimize the ads a little more on yesbutno, but the fact is, it’s a humor-based pop culture blog, so I’ll never get the click thru rates a product review site would get.

That makes it sound like people are being tricked into clicking on ads. I’m sure that happens sometimes; I know I have accidentally clicked now and then. But most of the time if I click on an ad it is because I want to know more about it.

I know some people have this complete abhorrence of advertising. They hate it, put up blockers, and refuse to use it. I think that’s strange: an ad is a source of information. Perhaps our antennae needs to be a little more sensitive when going through an ad, but really, what’s the difference? I go googling for xyz and find sites and ads – the places the ads lead me to might be exactly the same as the “real” links – so where’s the problem?

People are strange..

Many people on the web are quite intelligent.

I see very intelligent people clicking on ads all of the time. If you’re in the publishing business, you have a very different concept of ad based navigation than those who just want to surf the web and find a piece of info or a product.

For example, a well done humor site might easily get that level of traffic, but what ads are going to work? Not much probably, and not high paying. A site about airplanes and travel, on the other hand, could make a lot of money with that many visitors.

Look at this site: Darren has said it doesn’t make much, but I’m sure his traffic isn’t shabby. It’s just tough to advertise on (though I bet those Chitika referalls have done well). Political blogs are tough, too. Not that you can’t make money with just about anything, but it’s going to vary wildly with your subject matter.

RSS visitors are searching for something interesting to read. I might be an RSS visitor one day and a Google search referral another: I’m more likely to click an ad if I’m trying to solve a problem or research some concept.

As for how much intelligence you need to decide whether or not to ignore an ad – my day job is as Creative Director at a NY ad agency, so if this is true, thank heaven for dummies.

Last month was great for me because of high search engine rankings and almost all the search engine people (AOL, MSN and Google) clicked on ads almost equally.

That niche has a tendency to look down on advertising and thus is much less likely to click on it. They also seem to take great pleasure in proving to the world how “clever” they are by putting down everyone else, but that’s another issue. :)

If you only read blogs you might get the impression that everyone hates ads. Thats not in fact remotely true. I’d venture to suggest that AOL or MSN visitors is are far more representative of most people online that someone from BoingBoing.

What all this really means is that when you get these links you need to react accordingly. If its an AOL link, monetize it because they will click. If its a BoingBoing/Slashdot/Digg link then don’t waste your time monetizing. Instead find ways to encourage them to spread that link around further.

1) Readers
2) Shoppers

Readers don’t click ads unless it is eye catching – as Cassie alluded.

Shoppers are looking. They will click everything that might be of interest. Product blogs hence will have a much greater Adsense success than Topic blogs. (Topic blogs are commentary, opinion and ones like ProBlogger which focus on a topic but that’s not a product.)

Just think about the blogs and sites you visit… where do your eyes focus? On a Topic site you focus on the articles and deliberately ignore ads, ie, you don’t take the time to scan the ads when you visit. But if you’re in the market for say a digital camera, and you’re at Darren’s Digital Camera Review, your eyes will be scanning looking for any information that might help your decision. You’ll be click happy

This why RSS isn’t as successful – people coming via are RSS are more often than not Readers. They’re there to read, not to click.

Some Topic blogs can attract clickers – ProBlogger for example. New bloggers will click on ads, but then as they settle into blogging, will become readers since they know that what they need to know is in the articles.

There’s four forms of third party advertising on the internet:
1) Pay per click (eg Adsense, Chitika)
2) Pay per sale (eg Amazon, Audible)
3) Pay per view (eg Tribal Fusion)
4) Paid for space (eg Adobe buying time in Digital Camera Review’s banner)

#3 could be good for Topic blogs but you need heaps of traffic (I’d be interested to hear from Darren why he doesn’t use #3 on ProBlogger)

Can you turn Readers into Clickers? I really don’t think so. Click thru is always going to be much lower on Topic blogs than Product blogs.

So if you’ve got a Topic blog with high readership but low click through, what’s the value? If you want to make money, are you wasting your time? No. You’ve got traffic, and as the recent rash of buyouts indicates, traffic is worth a lot of money. Plus there’s also the opportunities in #3 and #4.

I like to look at the ads once in awhile if it’s on a page that I’m really interested in. I’ve found some great websites by clicking on Adsense ads.

By no means do I click and then hit the back button, just to make the webmaster some change – but if I don’t see an “aff” in the ad and it sounds interesting I like to check it out.

I’m not ignorant, just interested.

Cassie

When you are four years old, everybody looks tall.

What I mean is that it’s all relative. Compared to, oh, Amazon.com with an Alexa rank of 12 or so and a Netcraft rank of 16, any of us are puny and unimportant.

A lot of people won’t tell you their site stats. I don’t know why – I run around half a million page views and 200K or so unique visitors monthly.

If the site won’t say, you can get a rough idea from some toolbar sites:

Example: My main site currently has a Google PR5 (down from 6 in this latest update) and floats in Alexa between a 70,000 and 100,000, and in Netcraft around the 16,000 range (lower numbers mean more popular). Now Darren here has a PR6, is quite popular in Alexa (9570 right this minute) but scores not so well in Netcraft (54,688 just now).

So you could probably infer that Darren gets a bit more traffic than I, though not from Netcraft toolbar users. And that’s part of the picture too: a big camera site might need millions of vistors to be big compared to its compettion, but a site focusing on Commodore 64 computers might be “big” with a few thousand. A tech site will do better in Netcraft but worse in Alexa, because Netcraft is geekish and Alexa is not.

Now as to income: Darren tells all, but doesn’t break it down by site. However, he has said that this site doesn’t make much, which makes sense given its content. My main site makes around $300 a week or so, which makes sense because of its content (Unix and Linux geekish stuff). Darren’s camera site probably does a whole bunch better than that because of a) the people who visit and b) the ads that run.

So.. it’s all relative, You could have much less traffic than I do and make more money or vice versa. If we both had similar content, then traffic would be the largest influence on our income, and optimization (good or bad) might kick us 20 or 30 percent either way.

I know that really doesn’t answer your question, but you need apples to apples and we’re all a mixed bunch of fruit..

I wanted to check out your site, but you left no URL to visit – there is a field called website weh nyou post a comment – why didn’t you fill it in? First rule of promotion – always leave your URL! :)

brian