Has the AdSense bubble burst for small publishers?

I have been a Google AdSense publisher for a number of years now and have in fact been able to make a modest income from my websites up until recently. When I say modest, I mean that in the very literal sense. I know there are some people out there with very large and successful sites that make a considerable amount of money with the programme. For me however, it is enough that I can pay the bills and put food on the table, after all I I’m running my sites partly as a business, but partly because it is something I wanted to do anyway.

Things have changed radically in the last couple of years however. First of all the clickable area on the ads changed so that only the actual link itself would generate a click. This is a good change I think, although some measure of CTR (click through rate) reduction was noticed. However, it keeps advertisers happy because the clicks are less likely to be accidental. Happy advertisers are generally more likely to spend more if the visitors they receive are actually clicking on their ads on purpose. It’s common sense really publishers are happy with this.

A whole slew of changes have gone into the ad units themselves and the account administration pages. There are a number of things which could impact revenues but on the whole most of what has been implemented was a good idea. There are a couple of notable exceptions though.

Shopping online My main concern at the moment is the interest based ads. Whilst showing the visitor ads based on something they are looking for sounds good. I don’t think the reality of how it works has been thoroughly thought out. Showing ads based on the content of the page seems to me to be the best option. The visitor will surely visit the pages that have what they are looking for (assuming Google does as it is supposed to do, deliver quality search results). Once they are there, if they are looking at a page that they are (hopefully) genuinely interested in and the ads complement the page content, there will surely be more chance of them clicking on an ad and visiting an advertisers website. Interest based ads, completely (or so it would seem) ignoring the content of the page doesn’t in my opinion serve the visitor, the advertiser or the publisher particularly well.

Another thing about interested based ads is that whilst you were looking for a blue widget on Monday, the chances are you’ll not be looking for one on Tuesday and you might still be seeing the same old ads. My sister for example has noticed this effect of AdSense ads following her around after she had been shopping for a fridge freezer. Personally, I think that Google should pull the plug on this and go back to how AdSense used to work... you know, just showing ads that are related to the page content. Poor ad targeting can be a problem with AdSense and I haven’t had a huge amount of success with the special AdSense section targeting tags. Interest based ads it would seem to compound the problem. Flicking the switch in account settings within AdSense would appear to turn this off, but has the damage already been done? Are visitors already way of Google Ads? I certainly hope not.

Okay, so that was my main bugbear at the moment. But something else has definitely changed in the last few months. On one of the forums on Webmaster World many publishers are complaining about a serious drop in revenue recently. Whilst we can blame the economy and other things that are currently going on in the world for some of this, I don’t think it’s the whole story. But what is the problem then? Well, we don’t have any definitive answers and the inner workings of the black box that is AdSense are hidden so at this point we can only speculate... and believe me people are doing plenty of that! Add to that the whole Panda update thing and there’s a lot of pretty unhappy people out there at the moment.

In my case my income has been decimated, partly through the Panda update, and I suspect partly through whatever else is going on (more speculation!). However, I’m not one to sit around on my backside. I’ve revamped my main site and hopefully made changes for the good. I’m working in a (hopefully) temporary day job, very hard, but it was absolutely necessary. I’m optimistic that things will turn around and the AdSense programme together with my website traffic will recover and in the meantime I’ll carry on working on my sites and hopefully making them places that visitors really want to visit.

It would be good if Google would communicate with publishers more though about the changes they make or intend to make. Many of us feel as if we have been somewhat left out of the loop and left to drift whichever way the wind blows. It was also useful to have ASA (Adsense Advisor) on Webmaster World. Sadly missed and a very useful source of information and to some degree reassurance.

So has the AdSense bubble really burst? Hopefully not, but I’ll be making another backup plan just in case!

Has the AdSense bubble burst for small publishers?

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