On February 1st 2006 I for the first time put Google Adsense on NevBlog. I begrudgingly did this to fund my charity account, but the ads annoy me more than anything, so I will take them down for a little while.
Selling Pixels made me over $2,000 with just a little work and was more fun/unique than AdSense. However, I do see why people use Adsense. Here are the revenues from my first few days using AdSense:
After the 5th day, revenues were usually pretty low, somewhere in the $1 – $2 range or lower….sporadically jumping to over $10 on some days. The big money days were when I actually wrote about the ads, naturally drawing more attention to them.
Something really going against the ads is they were “below the fold” which means people must first scroll down to see them. I like extremely simple usability, and putting an ad where a navigation menu should go is a no-no to me.
If utilized correctly, people can actually make a decent amount of extra money with AdSense. This would mean positioning the ads correctly and writing about high pay-per-click topics, neither of which I did (or plan to). However, the ads tend to clutter pages and skew what content topics are written about.
This was a nice little experiment with Google Adsense for me. I learned something and came away with a total of $138 for the 28 days of February…..roughly $5/day.