ProBlogger

AdSense - Fewer Ads, More Money?

Interesting post over at Inside AdSense (the official Adsense blog from Google) that explains what has been going on with them having less ads per ad unit than previously. They explain the move as follows:

'“When we have a set of highly relevant and useful ads, we give them more of a presence in the ad unit by eliminating other ads. In some cases, if we determine a particular ad performs extremely well on a page, we'll remove all other ads from the unit and show just this single ad....”

“When we tested this feature, we saw that the increased user attention to these relevant ads resulted in a higher CTR. This means more revenue for publishers.”

They then show one of these ads in action (below).

Whilst I don't want to disagree with Adsense on this one I've been considering a post on it all day with a slightly less positive spin. Here are a few thoughts that have been growing in my mind as I've noticed more and more of these ads this week:

1. I've had a significant decrease in CTR since the announcement of these changes - While I know there are many factors at play that could explain it, I've not made any changes this week to my ads but CTR is noticeably lower. Perhaps its something else but it's a strange coincidence. I should say that I could be in the minority with this - I've seen a couple of discussion forum threads today full of people bragging about CTR increases - maybe it's just me.
2. These Ads impact the Balance of Sites - I've posted on this before but some of the ads I've seen are quite large and really dominate the pages that they appear on. The example below isn't too much bigger (font size wise) than the ads otherwise shown on an ad in it's old format - but some of the other formats - especially rectangle ad blocks - have some quite large ads showing on them. Whilst this might well increase the chances of readers seeing the ads and clicking through it might also increase the chances of readers getting annoyed by the ads and leaving the site - never to return. I have designed my blogs to be balanced and reasonably clean - the ads I've always had on them have as a result been quite blended and subtle - I just worry that these ads are more blatant and less subtle.

I don't want to argue against the ads - I'm sure they've done significant testing before going live with this - but I am interested in others experience and hope that the Adsense team are considering the full impact of such an advertising strategy. What do you think?

Blog Case Study - Is it time to Quit?

I just stumbled upon an interesting post by Jack Krupansky who will celebrate his first six months of blogging by quitting his blogging activities (on 18 August). Jack writes:

'I've put a huge amount of work into my FIVE blogs and gotten next to nothing in return. Sure, I've made a few good contacts, but I was doing that with email and my five web sites before I even started blogging.

In fact, since I could have been doing things that might have been more productive during the past six months, my lost opportunity cost is quite high.'

Jack will also stop commenting on others blogs and will kill off his blog aggregator and stop monitoring other's blogs - again because of the unproductiveness of these endeavors.

Since I saw Jack's post earlier today after a link from Business Week's blog I've been pondering why it is that some blogs do well and others don't. I've got nothing really profound to say and don't want to come across as knowing anything much about Jack's blogging (although I've followed a couple of them via RSS this past two months). I will make the following observations though about his approach that perhaps might shed a little light on the unproductiveness of his six months.

I want to do so not to attack Jack but in the hope that perhaps it helps us all learn something about blogging on a professional level. I do so respecting his decision to pull out of blogging - I'm never going to argue that people should blog on at all costs - as I'll say later - there is a time and a place to stop blogging and perhaps for Jack that time has come. However here are a few things I notice about his blogs.

1. Posting Levels - the first thing I was curious about was how many posts Jack had done in his six months of blogging. I took a quick look through his blogs and found that since February across his five blogs he's posted 407 times at an average of 2.43 posts per day for the 167 days that he's been blogging so far. These posts have been distributed over the months as is shown in the above chart. Obviously things started well (he started half way through Feb) and have tapered off in the past three months.

407 posts means his blog's have 407 pages on them (plus a handful of category pages/front pages etc. Whilst this sounds a lot its actually a reasonably small website in comparison to many that are out there. Whilst his posts are of a good quality I would suggest that 2.43 posts per day means the blogs will only ever grow by 870 or so pages each year - this sounds a lot but again if you compare it with many successful commercial sites I'm not sure it could compete.

As I've written before - if you expect to earn a good income from your blogging (or anything else) you need to put a significant amount of time into it - 2-3 posts per day is probably not going to cut it.

2. Endurance - Whilst we all know of websites that shoot to fame and popularity just weeks or months after launching - the fact is that the majority of sites (blogs or not) take time to develop, mature and find a readership. As a result profits are often low (if existent at all) in the first months.

Jack comments in his post that he's only earning enough from Adsense on his blogs to buy a coffee once or twice per month. It's a disheartening thing - I know I've been there.

I looked back over my Adsense figures yesterday and went right back to the beginning of my relationship with the contextual ad system. I added Adsense to my blogs (I had two at the time) in October of 2003. At the time I'd been blogging for just under 12 months and had written around 600 posts on a personal blog and a fledgling digital camera blog.

Even though I already had 600 posts and was getting 1500 or so visitors per day my first month or two of earnings averaged at about $1 per day.

My advice to Jack (and other bloggers) is that it takes time to build a blog up in terms of both traffic and earnings. My earnings have of course exponentially increased since that time as I've added more content, started new blogs, grown my blog's rankings in search engines and learned about how to use Adsense more effectively on my blogs.

3. Use of Adsense - the first thing I noticed when I looked at Jack's five blogs is that the placement of his Adsense ads is perhaps not very well optimized. Jack's chosen to use the default color scheme running across the top of his blog as a banner ad. Whilst it's great that Jack's got his ads above the fold in the top half of the screen I'd suggest that both the positioning and colors are letting him down.

I'd recommend blending the ads more into content and positioning the ads inside or closer to the content itself. I guarantee this would increase the rate of click through that the ads get considerably.

4. Use of Blogger - I'm a blogger snob - I'll admit it. Whilst I know some blogs that do pretty well on Blogger's free blogging service I rarely recommend to new bloggers that they use it. When I started my first blog I did so on Blogger and within a month knew that I'd soon have to move to my own domain with a proper design and a better blogging platform.

My choice was Movable Type at the time and I noticed a marked difference in the performance of my blog within days of making the switch. Not only was the system more reliable (blogger can be slow or even out of order at times) my site's got indexed much better in search engines and readers seemed to respect me more because I looked like I knew what I was doing due to having a unique design (I got it done by a blog designer).

Whilst I don't want to knock Jack's design - I find his blogs rather template like and without character. They have no branding or visually pleasing elements.

5. Blogspot Domain - Jack observes in his post that his five blogs are not as productive as his five websites. Whilst I don't know how long his sites have been going in comparison to his blogs or what his stats are like - I do notice one thing about his sites - they all have their own unique .com URL.

I'm no search engine optimization expert - but I do know that search engines seem to like real domain names.

Each of Jack's blogs is hosted on a free .blogspot.com domain - I suspect this has some consequences for his SEO.

Now by this point of the post I'm starting to wonder if I should hit 'publish' on this post. I've never taken the liberty to critique another person's blog before - but I do so in the hope that it will help Jack and other bloggers in the same sort of position.

I will say that Jack has a few things going for him (to balance my critique above). For one he can write clear and helpful posts, secondly he's a prolific commenter on other people's blogs and seems to work on getting himself out there and getting to know other bloggers (an important part of being a good blogger) and thirdly he seems to have a good handle on researching his posts and using technology like RSS to find content. Lastly he seems to have a good handle on some worthwhile topics - topics which can be quite valuable in Adsense, but topics that also can be incredibly competitive to become established in (perhaps another thing going against Jack).

The last thing that I'll say is that there ARE times to quit a blog or even blogging altogether. I'd suggest that 6 months is too soon and not long enough to give a new blog - but that really the length that you give it is not just about giving it time - it's about your own situation and the other opportunities that you have. Like Jack has said in his post, the opportunity cost of blogging is too big for him to continue to ignore it - if there are things that he could do with a better long term return then he'd be silly not to do them.

On the surface I'd advise taking a little more time to implement some of the changes above to see what impact they might have. Of course I say this with no knowledge of Jack's situation and don't know if he has the luxury to be able to do this. I guess it's really something for a blogger to decided for themselves.