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As an adsense publisher, I am observing the effects of the financial crisis on my advertising revenue. It dropped by more than 50% in the last three weeks. While I was going to blog about only that, I have read Vered’s post on adsense ads.

Then I decided to take her opinion into consideration too. Let’s just start with what I am going to say. It’s not nice to see that adsense income decline but there are lessons from this. I think the most important lesson is that people click on adsense ads really for the reason of being interested in the offer. We understand that because when there is a financial crisis, the click through rate declines. Pay per click cost didn’t decline too much, at least in my personal experience. So, from this data in hand, we can clearly understand that encouraging clicks do not help on increasing adsense revenue.

Encouraging clicks is strictly prohibited by Google anyway but people always try to find a way to encourage people within the rules. This is not going to generate any further income. People still try it because they think adsense ads are there to trick visitors into clicking them. They don’t think adsense as a process. In fact, adsense is a process as I have written earlier about contextual advertising and it involves those steps:

1. You have a meaningful article on your page.
2. You can be found among search results and you are in a relatively decent position, let’s say your page comes up between #1 and #50.
3. The search terms are related with your topic of your article.
4. There are enough adwords clients that need to show their ads on such a page when it is found with such keywords.

Let’s come to where adsense needs more effort in total quality management.

Some advertisers are eager to pull visitors to their website and they design and prepare the copy of their ads to be very attractive. Those advertisers usually decrease the overall level of quality in adsense because they are after quantity, instead of quality. The type of advertising Vered talks about is this kind of advertising.

However, with this financial crisis and lessons from that in mind, push marketing doesn’t make sense. When a visitor has the incentive of buying a product that she is interested in, she is going to click that ad anyway.

Thus the most important part lies in advertising visibility, that is putting the ads on places where people are not affected by ad blindness.

I was going to write more on this but I must stop here because blogger.com is banned in Turkey and I want to follow those news. I’ll continue to discuss adsense total quality management later on.

At this point, we should talk about “smart pricing”. Smart pricing is a technique that Google Adsense program uses. They have written only once about smart pricing. There is not much detail on how this operates. Briefly, if your web site creates too much clicks without ending up with any conversion (which means a sale, a subscription or any other criteria which is set by the advertiser or google adsense, for instance having visited more than one page in the destination web site or spending a certain amount of time in that web site) your web site is then being smart priced for a period of time. This is when you see 20 clicks on an ad which only brings $0.20, for instance. Those numbers are not exact numbers and I am not an adsense professional, so don’t take them as the ultimate truth. I am just telling this to give you a rough idea. I even don’t know whether this smart pricing is still being used or not. This is personal experience and knowledge from my own readings over the web.

This notion of smart pricing should give us another clear idea what adsense is all about. It is designed with the intention of being profitable for every player in the game. Your visitors are part of that game too. According to this perspective, putting adsense ads on your web site is like an additional service that you offer to your visitors. So, it is also meaningless to use plugins to set advertising visibility such as “no ads for friends”, “ads only for visitors who come from search engines”, etc. Advertising may be evil on many levels but Google Adsense is less evil in comparison to other types of advertising. This is the essence of Adsense and other similar contextual advertising systems.

Now let’s come back to the view that advertising sucks. This is the point where I suggest a more thorough total quality management for adsense. Adwords clients must understand at least what I have understand so far. Only than they will design meaningful ads instead of sucking ads.

There is still more to say about that. For instance, about our economic system as a whole. Because you never see an ad that sucks when it is about an absolutely needed good or service. Ads suck mostly when they are about a good or service which is not really necessary. Of course this is also a subjective issue but anyway, sometimes you can decide that only by using your intuition.

This is a remaining question and there aren’t any detailed views on that when I make a search on Google. Why not to use Blogspot or Blogger? Is it okay to use blogspot for a money-making blog? Does Blogger eat my share over adsense? What are the disadvantages of using blogspot as a free blogging service?

Well, those are the questions that remained unanswered. There has been a couple of weeks now that I host one or two blogs on blogspot and there is also adsense installed. As with the adsense share, I can clearly say that Blogger doesn’t have a share on your adsense income. You can see this in your adsense control panel too.

For any web site or blog, whether it is intended for making money or not, navigation is an utmost important issue. I can clearly say that blogspot is weak on navigation. Of course there may be third party templates for blogspot that provide a decent navigation but not everybody has the reach and technical knowledge to use them. The most ugly thing with any Blogger blog’s navigation regardless of which template it uses is the “older posts”, “newer posts” navigation. The url you get to when you click those navigation links are pretty ugly. They are neither user friendly nor search engine friendly.

On one hand, it is a fact that there are no use in such navigation in terms of search engine optimization because they are not time-less. Every second or third page of a blog is being changed constantly and there is no meaning in indexing them as page 2, page 3, etc. On the other hand, for the sake of usability, every url at this time should be readable by naked human eye. And this is a problem with blogspot.

Moreover, blogspot forbids to index labels for search engines by its robots.txt file. Look at any blog on *.blogspot.com/robots.txt and you’ll see that access is denied. What I told in the above paragraph is also valid for labels though.

Apart from those navigational issues, I can say that any blog on blogspot doesn’t have less chance than any blog hosted elsewhere. Blogspot itself is a competitive domain and so are blogs hosted on it. Fear not, you will be indexed quite normally when you blog on Blogspot.

As with the monetization part, it is extremely easy to put adsense on any blog on blogspot. However that doesn’t mean they are optimally placed. For instance, it is a huge trouble for an html/javascript illiterate person (who consists the majority of blog users) to place adsense within the blogpost, for instance under the title or under the post body. You have to use escape characters and there is a big chance that you end up with messing adsense code which is against the TOS.

Having said that, for people who can optimize adsense placements and are html/javascript literate, there is no reason not to suggest blogspot for a profitable money making blog on the web. At least it is a whole lot better than wordpress.com at this time where you cannot put ads on your blog in wordpress.com.

Hence, 6% percent of the Technorati top 100 blogs are on blogspot. Advantages are you are always ready to get dug, you are at the hands of Google.

Moreover, Blogger team is constantly making improvements in the overall quality of Blogger. You can see some of them in the Blogger Draft. On nice example of this is the comment box embedded below the post.

In the final analysis, there is no significant difference in terms of pro-blogging between blogspot and a blog hosted elsewhere.

Surprising, but true. He states that ads are the new online tip jar. He should be reminded of two facts: 1) Google Adsense is dominating the internet advertising market. As of March 2008, they have 70% share of the internet advertising market including DoubleClick. 2) It is strictly forbidden to encourage clicks according to Adsense TOS. Seth is free to fantasize though however these are the solid, hard facts of the situation. Here is his blog post:

“I never click on ads.”

It’s almost a badge of honor to say that. The subtext is, “I’m too smart/busy to waste my time doing that,” or perhaps, “I don’t want someone to sell my attention.”

But the real effect is that you’re starving great content.

I can say this because there are no ads here but,

If you like what you’re reading, click an ad to say thanks.

Pretty simple, but not an accepted online protocol, at least not yet.

If every time you read a blog post or bit of online content you enjoyed you clicked on an ad to say thanks, the economics of the web would change immediately. You don’t have to buy anything (though it’s fine if you do). You just have to honor the writer by giving them a click.

You still get what you pay for, even if you pay with attention.

With all due respect, I should say that his post is meaningless. Far from the imagination of an ordinary Seth Godin post.

Edit: Seth Godin felt the need to explain himself further on the subject.