Does AdSense Make Any Money

The best thing about AdSense is that you know it's not going to get you into trouble for selling links. It's a known fact that Google does not like paid links. If you do sell your own links do put a rel=nofollow in them to cover youself from any penalty. However, the problem with this is that most buyers want that followed link. It's a tough spot to be in. If you sell followed links you are putting your site at risk (the most likely penalty being that your site would be blocked from passing value).

As far as revenue goes selling your own ads is always the best way to go. You keep 100% of what your advertisers are paying rather than some other service taking a hefty cut. We haven't had a problem here finding advertisers - they always come to us. Even if you have to track some down for your site it might be worth it.

You can make money with adsense depending on who your audience is and how well your ads target. It might take some fiddling to ge them to target well and therefore increase your click throughs. Usually, more tech-savvy, experienced audiences click through less often. It depends on who your audience is.

Regarding your visitors - only you know what they'll be comfortable with. I don't *think* people have too much of a problem with the ads we have here. We haven't gotten any complaints, although who knows how many are blocking or leaving because of the ads. Many of our competitors are much worse with the advertising than we are - that's something to keep in mind.

If you think your members won't click on ads then you might want to consider other ways of monetizing your site. For example, if you have a loyal audience you could suggest donations as a way of supporting the site. Wikipedia has been very successful with this (and you could be too!).

I am with you on wanting to keep the level of commercialization to a minimum. We hope to run this site without ads in the future.

Quote: Strikes me that Google are onto a good thing - they make money of adverts but have worked out a great strategy to stop others from doing the same.

You came to the same conclusion that SEO expert, Aaron Wall, came to, and he isn't liking it.

I say don't worry about having sponsored links on your site without the rel="nofollow" attribute, Google just wants to be the middle man for all links, don't let them threaten you.

I wouldn't recommend AdSense. Google terminated my account because of I was supposedly clicking my own ads. Being a programmer myself, I know better because I know they are tracking me. Regardless of my caution, they terminated my account right before I reached the payout level. When I appealed it, they didn't care and blocked further communication - even though they had no proof. Now I wish I didn't pay them over $300 in one month for AdWords that never got me any clients.

I do not think Google's advertising program works. You're better off selling links yourself, and I wouldn't make them followable by the search engines because they wouldn't be if you were showing third-party ads.

i think goolgle ads are most reliable now a days and they create lots of money. i think that was a special case with the mr programmer who spend $300 and got no client and his account was terminated. i dont know wat was wrong with that. but google adsense are cool.

Adwords has worked well for me - I recently put adwords on a popular site that I run and it's now bringing in about $300 per week and that's just with one advert block per page. Nothing else.