Well Adsense sucks a bit , but not for everyone. the returns depend entirely on who you are targeting. Just pasting adsense will not get you far.
In general I have found that adsense performs the worst in following scenarios.
1. Any sharing related sites (torrents, usenet, photos, music etc etc) or even those much hated blog comment spam words like w@tch M0vie O9. I will be using words like you-know-what to prevent these spammers from finding my scratch pad. &^*@bi$%fu***.. anyways.
2. Make money online.
3. Casino and meds (which are not allowed by adsense anyway)
These are at least confirmed reports from personal as well as personal acquaintance's experience. There may be more such categories that are adsense fails.
Even for average performance sites in the category of 5 to 100 $ a day, adsense starts to suck. It seems that you will immediately come under a red flag (you make money, they is prejudice). So a drone army from some 3rd world country is being hired by google to check the sites and they have a 1-click send-abuse-email interface.
yeah its probably automated so my 3rd world economy guess may be wrong. So while you are being screwed by adsense you should know that no monopoly remains forever on the internet. I explored alternatives and whats up-coming these days. The good, the bad and the ugly. I want to get rid of the ugly first.
Note: I believe good networks or platforms are the ones that benefit advertisers, publishers and brokers equally. So if something is bad for publishers it's also bad for advertisers and vice versa.
Ugly butthole Ad networks.
Winner: Adbrite. In over three years I have used Adbrite they are holding the only 60$ I made and not releasing it. When i saw that I only make 0.001 cents per 1000 impression of interstitial ads (yes I actually had few ten thousands every month and not a fraction of 1000), I was delighted. Because it meant advertising was cheap. So I thought, Adbrite pockets between 95% to 99.99% of ad revenue. And as I know they even hold the 0.001% of my gangsta money forever. When you go in as advertiser minimum bid per eCPM is 10 cents. publishers make between 0.003 to 0.01, go figure. These people are abslute rip offs.
Bad networks.
CPA networks. All CPA networks suck. they start out ok and even get same fagging credits and positive reviews. The only one who has really done this right form start to end is CPALead.com Don't believe anyone who says otherwise because they probably were doing something illegal and got their asses banned from CPALead
CPALead is also the most reasonable if you communicate with them regarding any issues. Yes they do pay and pay well, have great conversions if you are doing it right.
Most of these CPA networks actually screw publishers over with no recording of actual conversions let alone cleaning out bad leads, advertisers may be shady as well.
Also platform wise I found CPALead the MOST ROBUST and Most advanced. No one else even comes remotely close to CPALead's platform. end of discussion.
There are several Bad networks. Nuffnang comes to mind as a failed singapore/malaysia based blog advertising platform. The fact is we NEED more advertising platforms, publishers NEED choices. But alas none or few are doing the business right like Adsense does. For example Adbrite had potential but they really screw publishers. Same goes for most of the other ad networks. There are tons who either have a failed platform or bad business ethics. I will think 3 times before I hand over my traffic and visitors to these losers even on a trial / split testing basis.
Good stuff.
Lets get to the good stuff albeit not perfect.
Chitika.com - Amazing potential and returns. They are improving but their platform sucks ass like no other. You can see PHP errors and warnings randomly jump out at you and several failed page load of their interface every 5 page views average. Even their support or contact interface is sometimes down showing the Zend optimizer default page. sigh! But here's the thing. they perform well for publishers, are not anal retentive (so far) unlike adsense and more importantly they strive to improve.
The revenue from CHitika has been at par or better than Adsense for me personally and I run some huge ass sites with decent adsense income. Also Squidoo switched to Chitika after adsense, I don't know what they are doing now but that's what they decided when leaving adsense.
ProjectWonderful.com - A great and honest generation X ad network. It has some really cool sites. If you are on a shoestring budget also you can do very well. Its a bid based network that only work on CPC based bids. It really is wonderful. It's like one of us DevOps would do when we come up with our own platform. simple and to the point and very well executed. Although the interface desires improvement (hey I said someone like us must have made it), but overall it's outstanding.
I started with $5 and bid my way to a lot of impressions and clicks for my measly 10$, best value for money ever. Usually if advertiser spends 5$ publisher should get $4 as I understand. I am definitely looking at ProjectWonderful.com for my future advertising or publishing needs. At this time only drawback is lack of enough publishers to choose from. But this will change soon. I have seen bids as high as $5. Oh Btw you can even ADVERTISE FOR FREE for 2 days AT A TIME for several websites if no one else is bidding on them. This helps new publishers get exposure when no stats are available on performance.
The bid auto calculates downwards if there are no other advertisers competing for the ad space. This saves a hell lot of money and gets great fill rates.
Self serving platforms - ShinyAds and openX marketplace are also good places to sell your ad space as publishers directly to advertisers for a smaller fee than what Adwords and adbrite kind of sharks are taking. Its a win-win. I prefer shinyads and I find openx platform itself is not very robust. better to build own.
disclaimer: I have no affiliate links what so ever on this crap shoot review. It's based on my own experience and I have no need for affiliation with the parties. So whatever you choose you cannot blame me or thank me for whatever happens next.
so why go? Although I admit they could have had more speakers from Google who could answer questions and generally show some Android developer support in Singapore. The whole reason is networking and meeting peers. When the IO started streaming and amazing Android doohickey stuff was being shown, you could hear the whole room go "wwwwwoooooo" and start clapping spontaneously. This wouldn't have happened at home where you sit alone and look around to share the awesome stuff you just saw only to find yourself gawking at the monitor. With like minded people who appreciate the same things you do it's different and end of it all you don't feel like maybe "something is wrong with me.. but I find the gyroscopic control of labyrinth quite useful and could use it for....
This is Asia guys not U.S. A.
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