I've been hosting Google ads on my site for the last year or so. I was hoping to make a little dosh from the traffic. I stuck the ads at the top of each page, right where Google recommends they should go, hoping to maximize the ads' impact. I thought I might earn a hundred bucks or so every few months. I was way off.

I've decided that for a site like mine, Google ads are not worth the screen space they occupy. I get decent traffic for a personal blog site. In the past year I've had one $100 pay out—that's it. Since that payout arrived in June 2006, I've had nearly 80,000 visitors, but only $71 in earnings. By the same proportions, if I had a million visitors in that time, I would have earned less than $900. If I wanted to live on ad revenue from my site, then to make $4000 a month I'd need 4.5 million visitors per month. How many sites get that kind of traffic?

I was happy to let Google have its little lot on my site until a couple of weeks back. That's when one of my blog posts went to the top 20 on reddit. I had 13,000 visitors in less than 24 hours. How much did it earn me? $1.69.

I keep my site as an outlet for my games, music, art, and thought. I don't keep it to make money; the Google AdSense thing was just a bonus. So if AdSense gets in the way of people enjoying the site, it simply isn't worth it. I'd rather have an extra 100 visitors than an extra 100 pennies. Frankly, I'd rather have an extra 1 visitor than an extra 100 pennies.

I didn't get rid of AdSense, but I relegated it to the bottom of the page for most of my pages. I'm sure Google would cluck their tongues: "That's going to murder your CTR ratings," they'd say. So what? A tenth of not much is not much. For my site's size and purposes, AdSense hasn't earned its keep.

Labels: technology