Do Bloggers Really Make Money From Google AdSense?

Update: Chris Anderson discusses Guy Kawasaki's reported low earnings.

Update: ProBlogger continues the discussion.

Of the 16, 390 blogs crawled in an earlier experiment to measure the correlation between inlinks and feed stats, 3, 687 contained Google ads (as measured by the inclusion of google_ad_client, an element of the javascript used to include the adverts.

But are any of these bloggers really making money?

• John Chow reports that, with 94,697 visitors and 184,640 page views in December, he made $693.36. John currently has FeedBurner stats of 1, 287.
• Entrepreneurs Journey, with FeedBurner stats of 1, 894 claims to make $1, 000 per month.
• m3nghua.com reports, for October 2006, with 3, 048 impressions, $9.55.
• InvestorTrip reports for November 2006, with 2,000 visitors and nearly 4,500 page views $25.55.

Well, there certainly isn't enough data here to really draw any conclusions. Perhaps the most interesting thing is to discover that the stats are out there (searching for them is a little tiresome with current search technology). This post was inspired, in part, by a post from Kevin Burton (I can't find the link at this time) which discussed his blog redesign. At that time Kevin went from a highly AdSense'd blog to one with no ads - Kevin stated that he wasn't making any money from the programme. Kevin's blog - Feedblog - has over 8, 000 RSS subscribers according to FeedBurner, though I don't know his web stats.

Finally, ProBlogger has an amusing post on how to ensure you don't make any money with AdSense.

Comments

[Caribbean Guy]

The $ per click model used by Adsense is only ideal for sites with content that is easy for Google to interpret, and which relates closely to keywords that generate high priced clicks and decent CTRs.

Many blogs and other small sites don't fit this category. These sites are ideal for branding/image ads, based on the $CPM pricing model. The problem is that the $CPM market is woefully underserved.

Most ad networks aren't interested in placing ads on small sites (the networks figure these sites aren't worth the hassle, given their business model and technology). As well, many of these networks have difficulty matching sites with the right advertisers -- ones running ads that are a good fit for the style and ambiance of that particular site and its audience.

Google's system avoids these problems, because their text ads look "ok" on nearly all sites (not great, but not terrible, the way a badly mismatched banner ad can look). Plus, Google's $ per click model generates lots of data, which simplifies the problem of getting a decent "match" between audience and advertiser, in a low cost, highly "scalable" process.

[edward]

I have several blogs I started july of 06 spent about a week posting and earned about $6.00 from adsense and got 1 affiliate sale.
For a $47.00 dollar profit on 2500 page views not a lot of money but definetly excited
I look to get my blogs up to
500k page views a dayby the end of the yr.

[edward]

I have several blogs I started july of 06 spent about a week posting and earned about $6.00 from adsense and got 1 affiliate sale.
For a $47.00 dollar profit on 2500 page views not a lot of money but definetly excited
I look to get my blogs up to
500k page views a dayby the end of the yr.

[USuggest]

http://USuggest.com allow the bloggers to make some extra money through recommended products directly from within their blogs, and hopefully directing their readers to online retailers. As such, the respective blogger would receive a commission from any sales generated through referrals!

[Vincent Granville]

Not only it's very little money for most of us, but worse -- it's bad money. I tried a while ago (things might have changed now), but the only ads displayed were junk, or it was sending traffic to competitors. Eventually I created my own ad network. It meshes well with my blogs, the design and content is much better than Adsense

[adsense blogging]

That's how earnings differ... well, here we can speak about blog created on interesting topic (like AdSense itself :) , or a bot-generated page without a single human word ever published... the bad thing about adsense is that it is still very profitable for black bloggers profiting with forbidded methods.

[InvestorBlogger]

I just did an experiment with Feedburner, but got almost no clicks despite hundreds of page views... I kow from other stats that the ads had been clicked over 35 times, but Adsense registered nothing... So I'm planning to remove Adsense after I confirm if this is true.

[Embassy Inc]

Slowly but surely I've been removing my Adsense blocks from my weblogs as the ROI was poor (to say the least). I think it would be more rewarding to use affiliate programs such as Amazon or Clickbank for revenue generation, though this is a transition that I have yet to fully investigate and implement.

[Tery]

If you need to decide where to merge your traffic- stop at https://valary.com
They have Pay per click, pay per action, contexts. Check their home page for more information, but I have never been shaved by them for all the time I work!

[Aaron(alternative web traffic ebook)Curtis]

Yeah my main website does much better with adsense than my blog,and in the blog the ads are really blended in nicely also but still very few clicks. Maybe I should try a different approach'.