Why AdSense and Yahoo!Publisher don’t work for me

Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher are reporting fewer and fewer impressions on sites that I know are getting over 100 visitors per day. Even assuming AwStats is inflated, I should be getting more than 4 impressions, right?

I guess they’re geo-targeting the traffic, and not counting impressions made by people from regions outside the target area. Also, more and more browsers allow ad-blocking, and given the popularity of the Firefox plugins for blocking ads, I have to assume a lot of people want this.

My goal from the beginning was to get as many companies involved in sending me monthly moolah as was humanly possible. That way, when someone goes kablooey on you (like CrispAds), you still have others delivering. I wanted a mix of direect ad sales, third-party ad sales and affiliate marketing. I threw in Google and Yahoo’s PPC just to see how they worked, and I don’t think they’re really for me.

This is really causing me to rethink any form of third-party ad service, though. I tried out Crazy Browser recently, and found in its default mode it blocks AdBrite as well as the PPC guys. If this is what people want, they’re going to have it, and there’s nothing we can do to force it on them.

But if people are shopping, they’re not going to block ads on affiliate sites if they know how to avoid doing it. If they’re savvy enough to use a browser that blocks ads, they’re savvy enough to know how to turn it off on an affiliate marketing site that has stuff they want. My conclusion? Affiliate marketing is really the best bet for the buck.

One exception: I continue to be impressed with Burst Media. It reports about as many impressions as I imagine I’m actually getting (I do think AwStats inflates), and I’m making a little more money every day. I know this one geo-targets, and it should be blocked along with any other blockable ads, so I’m not sure why it’s out-performing the others. Makes me wonder.

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Posted on August 18, 2006
Tags: adsense