Why Google AdSense doesn’t work on some niche blogs

As you can see, I’ve stopped running Google AdSense on my blog. I knew sometime back that I’d be forced to stop running it somewhere down the line but never thought it should be this soon. And if you’ve observed the fact, many blogs in the same niche as mine do not run AdSense at all.

Although AdSense can be highly effective in some niches, in some, like mine, it can be fairly useless and a waste of resources. The objective of this blog post is not to tell you guys that “AdSense sucks!”, because it doesn’t. The objective is to show that putting all your eggs in the AdSense basket not knowing whether you can profit more from other sources is “losing money“.

Lack of quality advertisers

When I was running AdSense on this blog sometime back, what I noticed was that there was only about 3 or 4 ads being circulated through all of my AdSense advertising. When a visitor sees an ad that he or she had clicked before two or three times, what are the chances of he/she clicking it again? So, the conclusion is that in some niches, there exists a lack of AdSense advertisers; And that in turn leads to publishers not being able to reap what they saw.

When I put the 468×60 banner on top of all of my posts, 80% of the time it displayed the same two ads. But if I have a rotating 468×60 banner at it’s place, I’d have had better luck.

Ad-blind visitors

There are so many AdSense publishers around and that had made the net-savvy people visiting blogs like these virtually ad-blind. They see the boxes, the ads, tend to read them in the first couple of hundred impressions and thereafter, ignorance is bliss.

To tackle this, I used to change the position of the ads, the layout and the color schemes but it was just becoming too much of a hassle. Not to mention it was also a fairly limited change since naturally, we’re all restrained by a thing called a blog-theme.

Other revenue streams outperforming AdSense

Honestly, this had been the biggest reason why I let go of AdSense. Other more profitable revenue streams started kicking in and AdSense didn’t prove to be the most profitable one compared weighed against resources invested. But the most important thing is that none of these alternatives were contextual advertising programs. And at this point, I became open to the possibility that it wasn’t AdSense, but rather contextual advertising as a whole. But the heart of the matter is that this solely depends on the blog niche.

Useless section targeting

When there’s a lack of advertisers, features like section targeting to target a micro-niche become useless. An AdSense publisher’s trump card might as well be the section targeting feature. And when it’s played out, there’s not much one can do to stay in the game. In a bigger niche where there’s no lack of advertisers, section targeting may significantly boost the income. But when 3-4 ads are being rotated in a certain niche, section targeting will sometimes return only the public service ads.

Although I’m a very charitable person, that’s not why I run AdSense now it it? If you want to know more about section targeting in AdSense, please refer to this article.

Of course, this is my opinion, and you guys are free to have totally different views. But I should tell you that I have experienced these things in practice and that’s what influenced me to do an article on this. And I’d be very surprised to see a blogger in my niche running AdSense on a blog where other revenue streams are proven to be relatively unsuccessful.