I’m thinking of starting my own contextual advertising company. It seems to be the thing to do with YPN getting into it last year, MSN on the way, Amazon rumored to be getting into it and today talk of yet another competitor to AdSense – ‘Turn’.
The word is that Turn (presumably to be located at Turn.com) plans to go head to head with AdSense. It’s being headed up by Jim Barnett former Altavista CEO and has reportedly got $10,000,000 in VC backing.
Definately a story to keep an eye on.
PS: Turn.com is registered to Turn Inc. until 2 August 2012 – looks like a long term project.
I saw Turn last week but didn’t find any information about it yet, when it will be launched .. etc but every new coming is always welcome since it will help making more money.
Hmm
My experience so far is that if you remove all other ads and just keep adsense, adsense start to give you the best result. If I put chitika or any other ad system within 24 hrs, I see drop by 30-50%. If I remove other ads within 24 hrs, again adsense goes back to normal. I guess adsense detect all those additional ad system and start to serve low value ads. For example (if I get same number of clicks on adsense):
With other ads + adsense = $20-$22
Only adsense = $40-$45
Therefore, I decided to stick with adsense. It looks like Google favors adsense only sites ;) . Please note that it may be because of some technical reasons, which I do not understand.
Interesting comment above. What I’m wondering is …. whether the revenue from those other ads that replace Adsense ads are at least at par with the ‘lost’ Adsense revenue
nice experiment anonymouse – i’ve heard a couple of other people say the same thing. My own experience is that when I added Chitika my Adsense went down about 10% but that my overall earnings almost doubled. Must depend a lot on the topic, positioning of ads etc.
Ah ok Darren. That’s the curiosity I wanted to satisfy above … but your Karma kind-a-captcha’red me … and my comment came late.
I’m really wondering how hard it would be to make your own contextual advertising program. They can’t be so difficult and must be somewhat profitable because there are so many out there.
The hard part for me would be finding all the advertisers
Interesting comments above re exclusive adsense vs combined ads… seriously Darren, would you consider starting a rival contextual advertising company? I think it has potential, and I myself have considered starting a contextual advertising company specific to Australian blogs and websites.
It’s only a pipedream for me, but for someone with your knowledge and connections it’s not out of the question.
hehe – no, never seriously considered it Andy – not quite my thing. :-)
I started programming my own text ad system with the intention of launching a new company. Then Google came along and did it better, making my own efforts seem pretty silly.
I guess you could say Google saved me a lot of work.
Has anyone seen the value of clicks from YPN go down since December or so?
I have seen it drop dramatically. Clicks used to fetch a bit more than adsense, but now it is a sharply lower than what I used to get on average from adsense.
Has me worried.
More Ad Fiddling
Update: Forgot to mention that I’ve also removed Google Analytics. That shouldn’t actually make any difference from the ‘user’ point of view, but it was a bit of javascript running that gave us access to lots of stats. The stats
hmm, no, thanks, its for me! Adsense is garbage and with pay per click one earns not very much :(