I’ve earned a grand total of $0.06 from Google’s Adsense. I hypothesize that optimal ad placement is highly correlated with fooling site users into thinking that the information at the other end of an ad link is supremely relavent first party information instead of a third party ad. Clicking ads may cause an unpleasant and confusing internet experience to internet neophytes. Additionally, I hypothesize that many users who may visit this site use Firefox with Adblock, and thus have all ads disabled. Neither of these hypotheses have been tested.
Sometimes, I just click the links that appear at the top of Google’s search results because the non-ad link may be further down the page. I’m not fooled into thinking the ad is a search result, but it’s easier to click a link that’s at the top of a search results list than to scan through the items in the list looking for the non-ad link corresponding to the desired website.
So, on to a tangential topic.
What happens when Firefox gets more widespread, and more people use Adblock? Will the internet as we know it cease to exist? Google seems to be diversifying already — getting widespread first, and then figuring out how to monetize their ubiquity. Perhaps they’ll be able to keep their revenue up without relying on tricky ads.
There’s always people like me; use Firefox, aware of Adblock, but will not use it unless the ad is annoying. I appreciate the sites that I do frequent and do not want them going away, so I do not block ads by default.
That said, ads are not necessarily a bad thing. That is why you have the classified section in newspapers, where people willingly go through a lot of ads. The trick is getting relevant and useful advertisements.
I believe that is Google’s route; collecting enough information about you that it can finally serve ads that you actually want to see. That is also why Google tries to maintain such moral high ground—their strategy requires an unprecedented level of trust with your data.
AdSense comes nowhere close, and it does not deal with the problem of false advertising, which I think is huge. There is one kind of ad that I enjoy seeing without specifically seeking it out, and that is the personal recommendation of a product from someone that has tried it an whom I trust. I predict a social model of advertising where ads can be voted upon and then served in a very targetted basis using the tons of data Google collects on you.
i love google Adsense, it enables me to earn money on the websites and forums that i have put up several years ago. if you got tons of websites, you can earn a lot from Adsense alone