Before I respond to Shane 's post that email is dead as a distribution mechanism, I wanted to post a followup to the The Death of AdSense post I made a few days ago, because — oddly enough — it's related to what Shane's saying.

As you recall, “The Death of AdSense” was a free report by Scott Boulch saying that nobody was making any real money from AdSense anymore and that there was a better way to make money, soon to be revealed by him in Part II of his report. Well, the report's available today, so I downloaded it and took a look. I knew there had to be something in the report to make Scott money. After all, he was paying a $0.50 commission for each referral to his site and thanks to the controversy his reports have generated he's gotten thousands of people to sign up… which is a big chunk of change even at $0.50 per referral. It's one thing to offer a free document in order to build up a mailing list, but to actively pay people to build that mailing list you want to have some way to, well, make money from all those people signing up…

Here's how he's going to make money. Part II of the report is titled “Life After AdSense” and it basically explains how to use cost-per-action (CPA) advertising networks to make money by buying traffic via AdWords ads and directing that traffic to the CPA networks and making money off the percentage of the traffic that actually converts. It's nothing really new, and most of the document is about explaining how CPA is better that pay-per-click (PPC) and how to use tracking IDs to fine-tune your PPC campaigns in order to find the profitable keyword sequences.

Oh, and at the end he provides helpful links to two CPA networks and urges you to sign up with them right now. Of course, those are referral links, so if anyone does sign up he'll be paid a commission from those CPA networks. If enough people do sign up, presumably that'll be enough money to pay off the referral commissions he owes. So in the end he'll have built himself a very large mailing list for next-to-nothing. And he'll be able to make money from that list for quite some time, I'm sure. Very clever scheme, and again reminiscent of the methods used to promote the controversial e-book The Rich Jerk. Really, we should all tip our hats to Scott's ingenuity.

Alright, show's over, folks. Nothing here to see… Move on, move on…

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

Alright, let's pretend for a moment that The Death of AdSense is right that AdSense is dead. Or at least that it's in a coma. I've been thinking about this on and off over the weekend and the question that comes to my mind is — who's to blame? Is it really Google's fault, as the report states? Or are other reasons?

The answer, of course, is that it's we (the AdSense publishers) who are ultimately to blame for putting AdSense on life support. We (in the general sense) are the ones who built “made for AdSense” (MFA) sites that polluted the Web with duplicated junky content. We put out books and blogs (ahem) about making more money with AdSense. We referred everyone we knew to AdSense, giving us all smaller pieces of the overall pie.

But you know what, this is no different than what happens with any new way to make money, online or offline. There's always a great deal of money to be made at first by the smart operators who learn how to work the system. Then there's the second wave of money to be made by teaching others those techniques (which either won't work anymore or are much less effective). Then there's the third phase of stability where people make money but work much harder to make it.

You see, AdSense is entering the third phase. This is the Internet we're talking about, after all, and so things happen on Internet time.

It's hard to make significant money with junky sites now. So now you have to work at it with a longer term goal in mind. And ultimately it comes down to two things: quality content and decent traffic. Work on those and you'll make money with AdSense, even after the “gurus” of AdSense have moved on to promote other things — looks like the hot topic these days is how to build lists.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

So there's a free document being promoted called The Death of AdSense that tells us that AdSense is, well, dead. As your ever-faithful reporter, I decided to obtain the document (you have to register) and look at what they're saying.

First, this document is Part 1 of a two-part document. The second part hasn't been released yet. The second document will include links to some kind of “solution” to this “death”. Hmm.

Anyhow, the document is only 18 pages long. Its fundamental premise is that AdSense stopped being a cash cow for people when Google changes AdWords (remember, that's where the ads come from) and allowed advertisers to exclude the “content network” (AdSense) from their bids, letting them place ads only on Google's own sites (mostly on the search engine results pages or SERPs). The document could have also mentioned site-targeted advertising for good measure, but it doesn't.

There's certainly some truth to the assertion that things changed rapidly for big-time AdSense publishers after this change was made. It didn't take long for advertisers to start excluding their ads from the content network, especially for pricey things. But it's kind of like crying wolf — after all, many (most) of the big-time publishers were making their money using MFA (made for AdSense) sites that really didn't profit the advertisers when compared to the ads that were shown on the SERPs. So the smart advertisers use split campaigns now, paying less for ads shown on the content network than those shown on Google's sites. Why not? It's what I'd do (and in fact what I do do) as an advertiser.

AdSense isn't dead by any means, of course. It contributes too much to Google's bottom line. Gone are the days of making a quick buck by deploying reams of generally-useless sites. That's the document's real complaint. We'll see what Part 2 brings, but I suspect it's about making money via affiliate sales. They're taking the shock-the-reader-into-wanting-more approach, kind of like the Rich Jerk used to take. At least you don't have to pay for this one…

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?