AdSense and the Long Tail of Advertising
After reading the latest ProBlogger guest posting where an advertising exec tells
bloggers to avoid AdSense (which makes me question the whole “guest post” concept), I just had to post a rebuttal. Because AdSense is more important than you might think.
The genius of AdSense is that it's able to monetize content that advertisers and advertising networks would otherwise ignore. It's the ultimate application of the Long Tail phenomemon to online advertising. By implementing a completely automated system for selecting and displaying contextually-related advertisements, Google is able to make money by displaying ads on small, low-traffic sites that are otherwise too uneconomical for advertisers to reach.
Does this mean AdSense is the perfect advertising program for every site? Absolutely not. If you have decent traffic in an in-demand niche, you can probably find a way to make more money from advertisers looking to target those kinds of sites. If you go looking for it.
But if you want a hassle-free way to monetize the traffic that's reading your content, AdSense is hard to beat. Not everyone understands how to use AdSense to its fullest, of course, which is why I wrote my book, but that doesn't stop them from making money.
The existence of AdSense also makes other advertising networks work harder to improve themselves, which is also a good thing.
AdSense isn't for every site, and I've never said otherwise. But for many sites, it's the only option that makes any sense. And sometimes, it's just the only option.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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