Yep I did. Joel Comm came back with his rebuttal to the Adsense is Dead and Life After Adsense reports. He continues to rake in tons of cash from it and offers reasons why you shouldn’t be too worried about the death of Adsense.
Two reasons:
1) If you build a decent site and monetize it with Adsense and for some unknown reason Google pulls the plug on the program, you will still be able to slap something else on there for some surfer to click on to make money.
2) Adsense ain’t going anywhere. Google earned almost half their revenues on Adsense. You think they are going to want to explain to shareholders why they killed that golden click? Don’t think so.
His argument makes perfect sense to me, except for the fact that the sites I have with Adsense have each earned about half what they did last month and the month before. Some have the same number of clicks, and yes, some have lost traffic. My bottom line is Adsense is dying. For me to get my income back up I have to build more sites. I’d sooner add affiliate programs to the pages than Adsense.
Comm does say that it is best to diversify the monetization of your webpages. If you look at some of his pages he uses Yahoo, Chitika, Google and affiliate programs. Smart.
It’s also smart of him to enter the fray concerning this stupid Adsense mortality argument. His report has a link to version two of his crap Adsense templates. The dude is a master, no doubt about it.
Want to know what you should be worried about as far as your online income goes? Employers. That’s right. If the cubicle bosses ever really start cracking down on net surfing, yours, mine and everybody else’s online income is going to go splat. Think about it. When else are people surfing around looking at all this junk on the web? When they are bored. When are they bored? At work.
So out of all the reports, Death, Life and Alive, basically they are all crap. We all know how to make money on the net. Build a decent site. Get it indexed or buy traffic. Monetize. None of that changes. You can still make money with Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika and the rest of the click parade. Try affiliate programs too. Man it’s all good. These reports are just noise keeping you from doing what you need to be doing, like making these damn PLR articles readable. sigh
14 responses so far ↓
BigWad // Sep 25, 2006 at 7:16 pm
I love your point about the cubicle bosses. But not everybody surfing the web and click on our ads lives in the white-collar world. There are still some white-collar jobs where you actually do work instead of spending all day cyber-slacking.
Thank goodness I don’t have one of them.
John Hocking // Sep 25, 2006 at 8:03 pm
I just wanted to thank you for your review of “Adsense is Alive”. Not only was it a great read but it has given me some ideas on how I can improve the quality of my own posts.
I have book marked your site and look forward to reading more.
John Hocking
http://www.blogging-resources.com
Splork // Sep 25, 2006 at 8:50 pm
Hey BigWad. Total generalization about workers surfing the web all day. There are a ton of hard workers out there who never surf a single page on the WWW. However, I do know that here in the States I get a nice bump up in traffic from 11a-2p. I also get another nice batch of traffic around 10pm too.
Thanks for reading
Splork // Sep 25, 2006 at 8:51 pm
Hey John. Thanks for stopping by and for reading. Looks like you got yourself a pretty good blog yourself. I’ll be stopping by as well.
Spikey // Sep 26, 2006 at 12:19 am
Splork,
Great points… I’m glad someone came out with the opposite of all this adsense dieing mumbo jumbo. Next week someone will be telling me that aff. programs are dying (fat chance…just look at how few people in CB actually sell their own digital products).
You hit it on the head all this stuff is just white noise for people to pimp what ever their pimping this week…. It’s all just such a load.
I know you feel similar and I just wish it would happen…but if all these wonderful people such as Joel Comm etc. would take what they know and just make their millions and go away (if indeed they’re making their millions) and leave us all alone to figure it out.
I guess just another day in this GIG…
I think you bring up a good pt. about people in the work place sufing…Don’t forget a HUGE population of Internet users are facing financial hardship as well… always looking for a better way or quicker way out…Heck look at half the people trying to make a go @ Adsense and the likes.
Keep your head above water, full steam ahead.
-Spikey
Splork // Sep 26, 2006 at 1:22 am
’sup Spikey. Yea just doing my thing. All this stuff is entertaining to watch but pretty much a waste of time.
Thanks for reading
mark ling // Sep 29, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Just thought you might want to know that I just did an interview with Joel Comm in Denver, also one with Charles Heflin in Austin.
Charles believes that adsense revenue on sites that are well siloed and with good LSI content in the articles, have higher adsense revenue per click.
Joel has had similar effects to me, which is basically none. Both our adsense revenues has either stayed the same or gone up over the months. So perhaps the search engines are just getting smarter at being able to separate the good from the bad.
I really don’t think adsense is dead, but I strongly agree about affiliate products instead of adsense, where possible, because it allows you to choose more relevant products and your rate of commission is known. You just have to make sure you have relevant visitors visiting your website.
All the best!
Mark
Splork // Sep 29, 2006 at 10:16 pm
Looking forward to seeing those on Affilorama. They will be worth a listen I suppose. Not sure what to think about Adense personally. I don’t think it is dead or dying for alot of marketers. Though it certainly has fallen into the toilet for me on my existing sites.
Roger // Oct 1, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Hi Splork,
My personal take on some of the above comments and the blog post is this – people in the know are aware that buzzwords, particularly catchy ones that can be abbreviated such as LSI (wasn’t that a song by ‘the shamen’?)go a long way in viral marketing.
The problem arises when we get stuck too deep on examining these techniques and changing our plans to suit (every week). For all we know google were using LSI two years ago and once it gets out people create products based on them. Then all of us optimize our sites based on two year old techniques.
My way of looking at it is pretty simple. Google want decent original sites that attract one way backlinks, fresh viral traffic, have certain aspects about them (EG a newsletter being run from the site) etc etc
Whether people are touting the long tail, LSI or any other buzzword, the core principle remains the same. Decent, original sites that google will be happy to serve up to their users because the user is also happy once served.
If people want to learn new buzzword related techniques every other week there is nothing wrong with that. My point is that for the average person, it MAY be better to just follow the core principle and bypass the BS. You get more done that way
mark ling // Oct 1, 2006 at 8:05 pm
I agree with Roger, and I’ve been operating on that core principle for a long time – relevancy. The thing is, google and the other search engines aren’t always good enough to recognize relevant websites, so you need to help them by working with them, ie do the basics right. Silo your site properly. Use good linking structure and title/h1 tags, anchor text, LSI keywords, etc.
I’ve noticed startling results from optimizing pages that were already relevant. So yes, the core principle is great and works to some degree, but you also have to do your best to make it easy for the search engines to tell what your site is about and that it is relevant.
regards,
Mark
Splork // Oct 1, 2006 at 9:28 pm
Don’t you think that if you simply write honest content about something you know, the LSI, relevancy and all that will just come naturally?
Roger // Oct 2, 2006 at 8:52 pm
Hi Splork/Mark,
Splork said -
“Don’t you think that if you simply write honest content about something you know, the LSI, relevancy and all that will just come naturally? ”
My opinion is that if you use the ~ method of checking LSI and seeing what that system classes as relevant, then sometimes it won’t just come naturally. Some of the results are a bit weird.
But let’s go back to what google is trying to achieve – they have created a system in order to provide relevant results.
Therefore, they are simply trying to get their search algo. to serve up the relevant ’simple honest content.’ They are messing with their system in order to make this happen. It may not be perfect yet.
So we have a choice -
a) tweak how we make our content (continually) in order to make it suit whatever system ’someone’ tells us that google is using.
b) just make relevant and ’simple honest’ content KNOWING that eventually google will create an algo. that points to sites like that.
Simplified again – instead of making sites to suit the ‘current’ algo. make sites that are the basis of the core system. Good quality, relevant sites. And spend the time saved on marketing/monetisation/the next project.
It’s just my theory, I could be wrong and it may not suit everyone. But I know I have already spent too much time trying to learn how to adapt to an ever changing system. So I want to take the short cut and try and predict what they’re aiming for in the LONG term. And to help with this I keep in mind that google are a business and their customers are searchers. What do they want when they search? What do they want FROM a search engine?
Hope this helps. Like all search engine speculation – that is all it is – speculation. But it’s fun, isn’t it?
mark ling // Oct 2, 2006 at 9:29 pm
It does to a large degree that is for sure, with regards to LSI, but you still have to make sure you do the basics, such as have your keywords in your header/title tags, etc, otherwise it’s very difficult to find your page on page 1 in google for your desired keywords, even if it is the best and most relevant article on the topic.
Also, with regards to effective siloing, often that comes naturally, but by planning that in at the start, you are making it even easier for search engines to navigate your website and determine the relevancy of pages than if you just ‘hope’ that the search engines will magically know that your articles are more relevant than some of your competitors.
Look at about.com, they have some of the worst articles on the internet and yet google seems to think they are more relevant than so many other sites. I’m not saying make articles that are any less relevant, because surely it’ll hurt about.com someday, but properly siloing your site and using LSI effectively is a great idea.
Splork // Oct 3, 2006 at 11:47 pm
Mark, Roger, thanks for weighing in on that question. Some good information was dispensed by the both of ya. My goal is to try to serve up the best content I can. Now whether or not I’ll be able to be a silo/LSI guru on every site remains to be seen. But I do know that I will try to get the basics right like Mark said.
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