AdMoolah News and Views

The Yahoo! Publisher Network has been in beta for almost 2 years now – the initial announcement was made on August 2th, 2005. I thought this would be a good time to reflect on my experiences with the program so far.

I have been with YPN since the start and have had my ups and downs with them. When I first started using them the revenues were not as good as they were with AdSense. Then in spring of 2006, I noticed that the income started getting a lot better – YPN was actually paying out better then AdSense. I’m not sure what changed, but things were great for a while. I was getting checks bigger than I ever was with AdSense. For a few months it was really good and I had most of my contextual ads with Yahoo. But then it started trailing off, and AdSense once again took over as my main contextual ad source. I try Yahoo again every now and then, but it has been worse than AdSense for over a year now.

The one consistent problem seems to be with targeting. Yahoo ads have never seemed as relevant as AdSense ads. Yahoo does have an ad Targeting feature. This lets you target your ads to 20 categories with 109 subcategories, but these categories seem way too broad. For example, they have an “Automotive” category with subcategories of “Aircraft”, “Automotive Resources”, “Automotive Services”, “Boats”, “Commercial Vehicles”, “Military Vehicles”, “Motorcycles”, “Parts and Accessories”, “Passenger Vehicles”, “Powersport Vehicles”, “RVs” and “Trailers”. Now, if you run a Ferrari enthusiasts site, these general categories are useless. You want only ads about Ferraris but these broad categories will give me ads about all types of cars.

Contextual ads work best when they are laser targeted. If I write a page about blue widgets in Toledo, I want to see ads about blue widgets in Toledo. I don’t want ads about credit cards in Toledo, or purple widgets. The great thing about contextual ads is that they can target exactly what the visitor is interested in at the time, and that causes them to click. Yahoo’s ads seem to miss the mark in this area. I’m not sure if there problems are technological, in that they just don’t do a good job matching, or if they just don’t have enough ad inventory to make good matches. Either way, they need to get this fixed.

Reading through the Digital Point YPN forum, it seems like I am not alone in this assessment of Yahoo. Almost all publishers seem to be saying they now earn more with AdSense than YPN.The common complaint is that YPN’s CTR is horrible compared to AdSense. When clicks do come, they seem to pay more than an average AdSense click, but there just aren’t enough clicks to make it worthwhile. This is due to the poor targeting.

I’m still hoping that things will improve with Yahoo and that they will once again start to have income levels similar to or better than AdSense. I think Google needs some serious competitors in this space to keep them in check.

I finally got around to updating my AdSense Revenue Sharing list. It’s been about 9 months since I updated it, so there were quite a few changes. Many sites were added and removed.

As usual, if you find any problems, or you know of any additional revenue sharing sites, let me know. You can leave a comment in this post or email me. I’ll try not to wait 9 months to do my next update.

AdSense is a great way for beginning Webmasters to make some revenue. There is a lot to like about AdSense – it’s easy to set up, it can display ads in almost any niche, once you have it set you can just forget about it and watch the money build up in your account. A lot of publishers seem to get overly focused on AdSense, and forget that there might be other options out there. But that’s a mistake.

It seems like most people I know who make good money from Websites tend to use more than just AdSense. AdSense may be a good default, but there are so many different ways to make money, people usually diversify and find a lot of different programs that bring in some good income. I do pretty well with AdSense, but a few months ago I tried an affiliate program on my top AdSense site. It ended up paying out more than AdSense does, and my AdSense income hasn’t dropped at all. I’ve also gotten checks from Amazon, Text Link Ads, direct sales, ReviewMe, affiliate programs, and other sources. And I still experiment with different programs all the time.

Look at Darren Rowse, his number one money maker is Chitika, AdSense is #2 on the list. And he lists six other revenue streams.

Look at John Chow, he makes more money from various affiliates, ReviewMe, Direct Sales and Text-Link-Ads than he does with AdSense.

Every webmaster should experiment with different programs for two reasons:

1. It’s good to have diversified income streams – never put all your eggs in one basket.
2. You never know which program or combination of programs will make you the most money. Try lots and lots of affiliate and advertising programs. Some will make you nothing, some will do OK, and then you might hit on one that will make more for you than AdSense ever did. You never know until you try what will make you the most money.

Don’t get me wrong, AdSense is a great advertising network, and should be in the mix of every publisher’s revenue stream, but don’t limit yourself. If AdSense is the only thing you’ve ever tried, go ahead and do yourself a favor and try something new. Here are a few (affiliate) links to try out:

Chitika
AuctionAds
BidVertiser
Text Link Ads
ReviewMe

Google announced today that the new referrals program is out of beta and will soon be available to all publishers.

AdSense referrals is a program that lets you put ads on your site, but instead of being payed per view or per click, you get payed per action. That means in order to get paid the user has to click on the ad and then complete some action such as joining a newsletter or making a purchase. This means that you don’t get paid as often, but when you do get paid its usually a much higher payout then you would for a click. These pay-per-action models are usually associated with affiliate programs.

I’m lucky enough to have been in the initial beta and I have experimented with the referral program. I have had some success, but nothing very dramatic. I think it is worth a try, but I think there are some disadvantages with it compared to some other CPC programs. The two main ones are:

1. You cannot choose the text you want to link with. One great thing about most affiliate programs is that you get to choose what text you want to link with. This makes it easy to slip the link into your normal content with it sounding awkward. This can help raise conversion rates significantly.
2. You cannot choose which page to link to. With most affiliate programs, you can link to any page on a site you want. For example if you are an Amazon.com affiliate and you write a review of a book, you can link directly to the book’s page on Amazon. With AdSense referral you are stuck linking to the page the advertiser chooses, usually the home page.

One advantage of AdSense referral programs is that you can chose the keywords you want to use to display ads. If you have ever had trouble targeting AdSense for Content ads, this could be a great option for you. You can even choose individual ads that you want to display on your site. Again, if you are in a small niche, this could be a great way to get some very targeted ads.

Again, even though there are disadvantages to it, I would advise most publishers to give it a try. You never know which advertising option is going to work best for you.

Advertisers in Google AdWords program now have the ability to get data on the individual sites where their ads are being run. For each domain or URL, advertisers will now be able to see impressions, clicks, and conversion data. This means that advertisers will have good information to decide exactly which sites they want to advertise on.

This should be good news for sites which perform well for advertisers. Sites with data that the advertisers don’t like will see less competition for their ad space, resulting in lower bids.

Found via Search Engine Land

A new website ReviewBack launched today. It provides a service where people can review each others blog. The sign up is free and there are no fees involved in getting or giving reviews.

This service is sort of like ReviewMe or PayPerPost, except that instead of paying cash for a review, you pay by providing your own review back to the site that reviewed you. So far, I don’t see any signs of how they are going to monetize this service, but I assume that it will be advertising based revenue.

This seems like a great way for smaller blogs to get some link love and attention from other bloggers. I have signed up, along with about 60 other blogs. Right now there hasn’t been any “review action”, so I’m not even sure how the whole process works. If you want to find out how this thing work, sign up and request a review from me! I have to warn you that I will be very very picky about who I accept a review exchange from.

AdSense has updated their program policies with two significant changes:

1) A new paragraph has been added to the Site and Ad Behavior section

Publishers using online advertising to drive traffic to pages showing Google ads must comply with the spirit of Google’s Landing Page Quality Guidelines. For instance, if you advertise for sites participating in the AdSense program, the advertising should not be deceptive to users.

This sounds like it is simply enforcing what Google did when they sent out their emails cracking down on low quality sites. This won’t effect most publishers and will probably only worry those doing arbitrage with MFA sites.

2) AdSense now allows three link units on a page. Previously they only allowed a single link unit. Link ads are fairly small and unobtrusive, so I think this will be a good way for some publishers to increase the number of ads on a page in a way that is not too annoying for users.

Yahoo! today announced to its publishers and advertisers that it has introduced “Quality Based Pricing”. This seems like it is very similar to Google’s Smart Pricing.

From the Quality Based Pricing FAQ:

What is quality-based pricing?

As part of the evolution of the Yahoo Search Marketing advertising system, we now include an assessment of the quality of our publisher’s traffic when you are charged for a click from that source. Depending on the quality of the traffic from the partner or publisher where the click came from, the cost of your click can be automatically discounted by a certain percentage.

This means that many publishers will see the amount they earn on each click go down. The initial impact may be limited because Yahoo is introducing it to a limited set of keywords, but the number of keywords effected will increase over time.

There are constant complaints about smart pricing in AdSense forums, I have a feeling we will start seeing similar complaints on the YPN forums as well.

I have an Smart Pricing FAQ that tries to explain Smart pricing as much as possible.

According to an article from the BBC, Google will be updating its policies to include essay writing sites in its list of sites that are not allowed to advertise using AdWords. Starting next month, Google will no longer allow ads for “academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations”.

Google, commenting on the change, says its advertising policies are “developed and evaluated based on multiple factors, including legal and cultural considerations plus user and customer experience”.

And a spokesperson said that the advert ban was expected to be applied across Google’s global network.

Of course, the essay writing companies aren’t too happy, while the universities are applauding the news. To me this ban seems kind of arbitrary. I don’t think these ads provide a poor user experience and they bring in money, so it’s just a matter of Google deciding that this industry is “bad” somehow. What industry is going to be next? Of course Google is allowed to reject any ads they want to, but does it make good business sense?

If you are a publisher who happens to have a site that includes these types of advertisers, I’m sure there will be a dip in AdSense revenue starting next month.

It’s been so long since I’ve heard any news of Microsoft’s potential competitor that I had almost given up hope for it.

But John Battelle, had some interesting words to say about the Microsoft/aQuantive deal:

I did have a very interesting talk today with Yusef Mehdi, who ran the aQuantive deal for Microsoft, and Brian McAndrews, the CEO of aQuantive. What struck me most was the commitment to have a solution that counters AdSense, but with a richer suite of services for both publishers and advertisers. Microsoft is really committed to this business, but they have work to do to productize and integrate this acquisition. More soon.

That’s promising.