Jim at BlogKits has a good article on why Google Adsense Doesn’t Work for all Bloggers. His argument is sound and his figures are good. He does a case study whereby he comes to the conclusion that a blog with 200 visitors per day with 1000 page views would earn $2 per day if the click through rate were 10% and the value per click were 2 cents each.
His thinking is similar to a post I did a few months ago asking ‘is contextual advertising Viable on a Blog?‘ I gave some tables there that showed a range of different potential earning levels depending upon:
1. Click through rate
2. Traffic levels
3. Value of Clicks
Earnings varied vastly with different combinations of the above ranging from 10 cents to $6250 per day!
Jim’s numbers add up and I agree with the main thrust of his argument that Adsense is not a good option for all (or even most) bloggers wanting to make a substantial income from blogging however there are just so many variables to consider. Of course you need to keep a couple of things in mind in reading Jim’s article:
1. Jim uses Adsense on his BlogKits blog – maybe its just as a bit of research, but I’m sure the few dollars a day it earns are helpful
2. Jim does of course have a bit of a vested interest in bloggers trying other advertising methods.
Jim finishes his article by saying:
‘Forget Adsense, Bloggers are better served creating custom partnerships or sponsorships with advertisers. In arrangements of this nature, a blog with niche-specific content, that is straddled with low traffic, has the opportunity to earn much more by converting less.’
I agree with his argument in principle but I’m still waiting to see examples of it working out in practice. Most of the new blog advertising programs like BlogKits are pretty new and from what I can tell their sign up rate is not huge yet for either publishers or advertisers – it will take time for it to catch on and for us to find out if his hypothesis of small traffic blogs earning good money is in fact proven to be true – Lets hope it is!
