Adsense just downright sucks!

That's right, Adsense sucks -- at least it does on this blog anyway. I'm sure that others are doing very well with it, but on this blog, the ads are not targeted very well, and no one clicks on them. I'm thinking that the readers of this blog are like me and are just to savvy to click on Google Adsense ads.

I've been controlling my ads with OpenAds for the past 3 weeks and its been very enlightening to see the stats. The stats say that the Text Link Ads ad gets clicked on about 1/3 to 1/4 of the time that it is shown, while the Adsense ad gets clicked on less than 1% of the time. This says a lot about the readers of this blog, like they are interested in how to make money online, or text links, or are web developers who, like me want to get links to their sites. I also think it speaks to the relevance of Adsense on the blog. I've been trying for 3 months to get more relevant ads on this site and have tried everything I know how to do, but I still get ads about trenching and other things that I know wouldn't interest anyone coming here. This annoys the crap out of me, and since I'm pretty sure it annoys the crap out of you too, there won't be any more Adsense ads on the site. In fact, I'm even removing them from all older posts as well. Its just not worth the effort at this point, and I really only want to display stuff that people aren't annoyed by.

I came to this conclusion after listening to the podcast on the last post. I hear Shoemoney say over and over again not to monetize a site until you get good traffic, and that ads in body content are just bad. I'm starting to believe more and more what he is saying and he's inspired me to try to connect with my readers (you) more instead of annoying them to death. If you haven't listened to that podcast yet, I highly recommend it. Maybe it will inspire you to do something positive on your blog!

So, is this the end of monetizing this blog? Sorry, no. I've been using this blog as a platform to bring web development ideas that work for almost four months now, and have also been using it to train myself in how to increase traffic to a site as well as how to monetize a site. And while this is not a make money online blog, I think it will always be an experiment in monetizing a website, and this change reflects that experimentation. In fact, there may be a point in time that Adsense does work for this site, but until that time arrives...no more Adsense.

P.S. Other changes going on: I've been placing an image in every post that is a graphical representation about what I'm posting about. I was afraid to make this image the same size as the adsense ad because I thought that would look bad, but now that there is no adsense, these images will be smaller now (250x250). Yeah!

And thanks to Internet Babel for letting us know that the rest of the videos for the Shoemoney/John Reese interview are up.