After more than five years of writing about AdSense, it should be obvious that I like it. A lot of people like to dislike AdSense, but I don’t. AdSense is easy. In my world, easy is worth a lot.
Too Many Remotes
How many remote controls do you use to watch TV? For the longest time, I was using 3 remotes: one for the TV, one for the DVR, and one for the Blu-Ray player. (Why didn’t they call it “BluRay”?) My wife always complained because she said if I died she’d never be able to watch anything. (Not true: our daughter knows how to work the remotes, so it would take a double tragedy to stop the viewing. It’s nice to have a purpose in life, though.)
For some reason, I decided to make myself more expendable by configuring a single remote to control everything. I sat down and looked up the code to hook up the DVR remote so that it could control the TV, after first looking up the keypad sequence to program the remote. I then spent 20 frustrating minutes trying to find the equivalent code for the Blu-Ray player, to no avail.
So now I have 2 remotes. Better than having 3, not as good as using only one. Although sometimes I still have to use that third remote for the more obscure items, so it’s really more like 2.5 remotes…
The point of this story is not that I should buy a Harmony remote, though that may be a good idea. The point is that for the longest time it was easier for me to use those 3 preconfigured remotes than for me to spend the the time figuring out how to reprogram everything. Why? They just worked.
AdSense is like a Preconfigured Remote
That’s what I like about AdSense: it works right out of the box. You choose an ad format, generate some JavaScript (or do like I do and steal it from one of your other sites), paste it onto your page/template, and you’re done. Your page content is analyzed and relevant ads are shown pretty much right away. You get access to a wide variety of ads across all kinds of niches and in various languages and geographies. You can choose to display text ads only, images/video ads only, or a mix.
Is AdSense the most lucrative advertising program for your site? Possibly not. In some niches it’s possible to do better by promoting affiliate products or CPA (cost-per-action) signups. But you need to do the research to find an appropriate ad program, apply for it (in some cases — and you may get rejected if your site is too small or doesn’t get a lot of traffic), and learn how to use it. Not hard, but it can take some time.
It’s really all about where you want to put in the effort. When I develop a new site, AdSense is usually my first choice because it takes no thought to implement, which lets me focus on content and traffic development. Especially the latter — a site with no traffic is worthless, no matter what ad program you’re using. Later, when a site has been running for a while I may look at alternatives. Or not… depends how busy I am. The alternatives are rarely much better.
Like I said, AdSense is easy, and in most cases it’s good enough.