#1) The CPM’s are Weak
Yes CPM’s are dropping everywhere and the days of $50CPM are distant memories, but the CPM’s with AdSense always seem to be low. Why is it that the CPM’s suck if you are publisher, and the CPC are so high when you are on the other side as an advertiser? Oh yah, they have a market cap of $175,000,000,000. Yes that is 175 billion with 9 zeros. Why don’t they share publicly what percentage of the revenue they actually give to the publishers? Can you think of a reason why they would hide this? Every single ad Network and every single affiliate company in the world tells you what percentage payout they give you. Google is the only one that doesn’t. What kind of partner, doesn’t share that information with you? It should be illegal not to disclose.
#2) They Look Like Crap
This one is baffling more than anything. How can a company with over 20,000 employees not come up with a banner that looks more ascetically pleasing to the eye? The customizations are weak. Colors and rounded corners? Come on G, come up with slick looking ads! Even the Graphic ads, have the self promotion, ‘Ads by Google’ that makes them look ugly. Do you really need to advertise AdSense more? Thousands of top bloggers have pulled them off their site for the simple reason of how bad they look on their site, and you should too if you want your site to look more professional.
#3) Inverse Relationship to Revenue
After meeting and talking to hundreds of site owners over the years and meeting folks who say they either make money or don’t make money off AdSense, I come to this conclusion. AdSense revenue is inversely related to the quality of your content. If you have great content, readers are going to stick around your site and read more but if you content quality is weak they are going to keep looking elsewhere and click on the Google Ads with the keywords of what they are really looking for. So if you have keyword rich weak content, you will actually make more money with AdSense.
#4) PSA’s
Also known as Public Service Ads, these ads show up when Google can’t find a match for your site, and they normally only show up when you have the default set to display only graphical ads. OK, I can be as charitable as the next guy, but not only do you not make any money off these ads, they look like crap. I’ve yet to see a nicely designed PSA. Here is a tip to all you charities out there, hire a professional designer, or get a professional graphic designer to ‘donate’ his services and get some nice looking banner ads designed. Otherwise, keep those lousy PSA’s off my site.
#5) Anyone is Approved
This is the biggest joke with AdSense and the reason that the web is filled with millions of completely useless shitty sites. AdSense is the cause. Yes, the biggest search engine in the world, the folks who pride themselves on “helping your organize information” is the #1 culprit of enabling anyone to create a crap site and make money off it. Anyone can put up a website, plagiarize, steal and copy content and then slap on AdSense ads to potentially make a few bucks. Almost every single ad network in the world has some type of approval process and quality control, but not AdSense, everyone is welcome. Why? Google’s revenue is the ultimate long tail and those hundreds of millions of spammers are all soldiers in Google’s revenue army, all splogging and generating pennies that add up to billions.
#6) It Makes You Lazy
AdSense is a crutch for the lazy publisher. It is kind of like crack cocaine, when you get a small taste of it, you keep coming back for more, even when you know it is bad for you. You think, oh well, at least it is some money. I never hear anyone saying. OMG, I am making a killing off AdSense on my ONE site! The few bucks you get a month keeps you on a drip feed life support so you don’t go out and sell your own ads.
#7) They keep your Money
This is one of the things that really irks me with Google and should make you mad too. How many millions of dollars of other people’s money do they have in the bank that they will never pay out? They used to have a lower payouts lever and now it needs to be $100. I guarantee that there are litterly millions of small publishers with super low traffic that will NEVER hit the minimum payout level and just give up or remove it from their site. What happens to this money? Google keeps it. Hmm? I’m guessing that the guy in the 3rd world country with the $38 dollars sitting idle in his account needs the money more than they do? They should be forced to pay out all monies owning to small site owners!
Enough is enough. Let’s convince Google to disclose what percentage of your revenue they keep and force them to pay out all monies owed to small site owners.
How much money is sitting in your AdSense Account?
This guest post is by Chad Randall. He has been in the online advertising space for over 10 years, and is now the CEO of AdvertiseSpace Inc. http://www.AdvertiseSpace.com.
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