When I first launched alexking.org back in 2002, I didn’t plan to make any money from it or do any advertising on it. I remember friends telling me I should put up ads when I was slashdotted and I had little interest in doing so.
Much has changed since then, primarily the fact I no longer have a “day job” and this is no longer “stuff I do in my spare time”. Instead, this is “stuff I turn down paying work to do”. I have no expectations of getting fully compensated for the content, software and plugins I make freely available here, but if I can bring in a couple of bucks through ads and donations it helps me justify the time I spend on these projects.
I’ve tried a number of monetization approaches over the last 5 years, with varying degrees of success. I’ve basically viewed this as an experiment, and the results are quite interesting to me. Especially the response to the changes I’ve made recently in asking for donations. I’ve got details on this, including a spreadsheet of donations later in this post.
Google AdSense / Yahoo! Publisher Network
I’ve tried both Google AdSense and the Yahoo! Publisher Network for contextual ads. I even experimented for a while loading each half the time. Neither one was a major payday for me, but the basic results I’ve seen are:
- Yahoo! pays a little more.
- Google’s ads are more relevant.
I pretty much only use Google’s AdSense now because I prefer the relevance to the extra couple bucks.
I’ve mostly kept these ads in the sidebar where they aren’t too annoying, however a couple of months ago I started trying something new. I’ve started inserting a couple of ad blocks in blog the content itself if the visitor is using IE. This decision is based on the research that shows that IE users click on more ads than Firefox users. Also, since I never browse in IE, these inline ads don’t bother me. π
Text Link Ads
I started selling text links through Text Link Ads1 a little over a year ago. I like the service and have had good results with it. I generally make more per month from Text Link Ads than I do from all the other ad services combined.
Kontera In-Text Ads
I installed Kontera’s in-text ads at the end of last year and the response was pretty much a universal “we hate these”. I was really surprised at the reaction because I see these ads on lots of sites and they’d never bothered me.
I’ve since turned them off except for pages rendered from search engine hits. Basically, if you search for something and click a link to my site, you see these ads on the initial page you clicked through to. Subsequent page loads have these ads turned off.
I haven’t gotten any more complaints since I changed to this implementation. I still haven’t fully decided to keep these or not – I might turn them off at some point.
Amazon Sponsored Shopping
I added this to the sidebar during the holiday shopping season, and I don’t think anyone has ever used it. Or maybe it isn’t even configured right. I don’t really know why I’ve kept it on the page.
Text Links
While I use Text Link Ads to sell links on prominent pages on this site, I also offer text links on all other pages using my own system. These are fairly expensive and I haven’t sold many (perhaps I’ll drop the price a little), but it’s nice to be able refer link exchange
requests to my link purchasing page.
Sponsorships
The Text Link Ads folks offered to sponsor alexking.org for a couple of months earlier this year, and for the first time I placed banner ads in the content areas of the pages themselves. I accepted this because I use their product myself and felt comfortable recommending it on my site.
I’m glad I experimented with this, but I’m also kind of glad to have the banners removed and the ads back in the sidebar.
I like the sponsorship idea if there is a good fit, so I might try this again in the future.
Donations
I’ve always accepted donations for the free software I make available here. My experience is that people generally don’t donate, especially when you take an understated approach to asking for the donation (a small button, text in a README, etc.).
A few months ago, I decided to try a little experiment. Whenever someone clicks a download link on the site, I show them a little donation form and ask that they consider donating $1 (or more if they like).
So far this has been working wonderfully. The average amount of each donation has predictably plummeted, but that has been more than offset by the increased frequency of donations. Haivng the donation request be more prominent seems to result in more donations.
I also get the occasional purchase from my wish list – most recently I received iWoz, which I quite look forward to reading.
Because I love it when other folks share information you aren’t normally privy to, I’ve created a public Google Spreadsheet with all of the donations I’ve received since launching the alexking.org back in 2002. Have fun with it.
Ad Location and Standards
While I may not like the way it looks, “in your face” advertising definitely seems to work much better than tucking the ads away in a sidebar. Putting the ads at the top of the page seems to work a little better than in a sidebar as well, but I don’t like the way it pushes the content down.
However, this is my personal web site, so I can choose to keep the ads somewhat out of the way instead of trying to squeeze every dime I can out of the site.
I also recently turned down sponsored posts and an opportunity to put a flash banner ad on my home page. Sure it probably would have made a few bucks, but I felt it would really detract from the overall site experience. There’s definitely a “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” side of how you choose to implement advertising on your site.
Conclusion
Very few people, especially self-employed people, have the luxury to spend their time on things that don’t generate any income. By finding ways to monetize my site, I’m able to spend more time working on it and on the projects I make available here. That results in more freely available stuff for you guys. I see it as a win-win.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the Building alexking.org 2.0 series. I’ve enjoyed the feedback and discussion (both in the comments and via e-mail) it has sparked, and I hope that some of the information here has been useful to folks considering similar endeavors.
- That link has a referrer ID in it, if you sign up I get a nice kickback. [back]
The donation experiment is interesting. Nice to see that more people donate, and even if they donate less in average, this sums up to more bucks for you. I implemented a similar thing on my own blog and noticed the same effect.
As for adsense, I think your strategy, err.. sucks π
After playing with Adsense over the last 3 years on my blog, here is how I finally decided to implement it:
– serve adsense ads to new visitors
– don’t serve ads to regular visitors
– always serve ads if visitor comes from a search engine
– depending on context, add ads on older posts
This gave me the best results both regarding income and intrusion. I particularly like the fact that returning readers see no ads.
Cool post. Very interesting to see how a programmer monetizes his personal blog. Thanks.
It’s great that you’re getting at least something for your efforts.
Have you tried making the background of the AdSense banner blend in more with the surrounding background? That might help increase CTR.
I like your “IE only ads” trick – very clever π
And the “search engine hits only” Kontera trick is brilliant – I might “borrow” that π
I’ma have to try the other ones cause I’m getting nothing out of Google.
Ozh’s comment gave me a quick brainstorm: it would be interesting to put ads on the most popular posts that are at least N days old. You know, monetize that Popularity Contest plugin.
Maybe, maybe not.
Same with me,but i’v just using Google Adsense
Good post, the bit about IE users clicking more than firefox is obvious really, but the search engine tip is good, I already build a shedcloud based on the hittrail, so to moniterise it would be the next step
Good article. I think most people when they think about making revenue automatically just think “Google Ads”. There sure are a few other good options out there!
Alex,
Good overview, and some great tips in there. Appreciate your willingness to open up the spreadsheet too! Any prospect of an upcoming how-to (dare I suggest a plugin?) on serving the context ads on search engine traffic only? Besides Kontera, Amazon has a service for these now as well. I’ve seen other sites that announce “You came from Google searching for ____; also try ___” or whatever – assume the principle is similar.
[…] respected Alex King’s blog as both highly original and very quality focused.ΓΒ He writes: When I first launched alexking.org back in 2002, I didnΓ’β¬β’t plan to make any money from it or do any…. […]
I’ve experimented with AdSense on non-blog sites, and I was amazed that subtle little changes can radically increase your income, sometimes even doubling it.
Example: Although I was reluctant to add Google’s Ads on the top of the website (replacing the banner ads that were already there), when I did so, my Google AdSense revenue doubled. Adding square ads in selected content doubled our revenue again, even though the square ads only appear on article & recipe pages.
Also, background color and placement make a huge difference as well. In some locations on your site, having Google Ads with the same background color as the surrounding area will out-perform ones with a different background color, and sometimes it’s the opposite… even on the same page!
I would suggest making the Google Ad on this page in the sidebar match the background as an experiment. Sometimes it helps, plus the ads appear less intrusive.
Also, ads AFTER the content has worked well for us. People read the page and then want some place to go. Having Google Ads at the bottom of the page gives people a place to go which we get paid if they go there. That might be worth experimenting with was well.
So, in summary, for those who are using AdSense, start experimenting on its placement and the colors, and you could wind up increasing your revenue just by making a small color or placement change.
Alex has done some great experimenting already and given you the results. Don’t forget to experiment on your own site too, because each site is different, with different layouts and different audiences.
Sometimes its the little things that make a huge difference.
And thanks Alex for sharing your results with us.
[…] (This article was inspired by an article by Alex King called Building alexking.org 2.0, part 11: Monetization.) […]
[…] of my favorite building alexking.org posts has to be the recent one on the monetization of his site. It goes into details on what has worked for him, and what hasn’t, something that […]
[…] today I was reading Alex King’s post, Building alexking.org 2.0, part 11: Monetization, and I came across this really great idea for dealing with these kinds of “link […]
[…] of my favorite building alexking.org posts has to be the recent one on the monetization of his site. It goes into details on what has worked for him, and what hasn’t, something that […]
I definitely need to monetize my blog more efficiently, I receive around 8000 to 10500 visitors a day an d make only 6$ a day, which is around 180 a month, which again is a joke for those numbers. Thanks for this article, I will use it as a reference later on this summer to get my income going π
In addition to the occasional donation, I make it a habit to click all the google adwords on the sites I like, especially if the ads are from major brands. A Firefox plug in (call it Robin Hood) in to do this for me and to estimate how much money I transfer to indy bloggers from the Fortune 1000 would be awesome.
Robin Hood, I hope you realize that MOST advertisers on the Google Network are NOT Fortune 1000, and many of them are betting 50% of their paycheck to see if they can get an online business going so they can quit their day job. Thanks to you, you are stealing money from hard working individuals trying to become free of the very Fortune 1000 companies you seem to be targeting.
And even if you only click on Fortune 1000 ads, we can thank you for higher prices. Don”t you think that the Fortune 1000 companies will simply raise prices to cover increased costs? Every single cost, plus profit is included in the price of an item. You raise the costs, the price must rise. You are actually hurting the average consumer by making them pay higher prices for goods. The corporations are going to get their profits no matter what, and pass ALL the costs, including advertising, onto the buyers. That’s how it works, like it or not.
Also, by repeatedly clicking on ads on websites, you are flagging the website who you are trying to support for fraud and could get their Google AdSense account banned where they can’t make any more money. Google tracks fraud and will ban a website from their network if there is too much fraud coming from it, because they will assume that the owner of the website is involved, since they are the ones getting the checks.
You think you are helping people by doing click fraud, but you are hurting the very bloggers and websites you are claiming to help, and are hurting individuals and small companies instead of the Fortune 1000.
[…] as Belle (via Alex King) advises; respond with a link to your advertising rates (with a noreply@… e-mail addy, of […]
[…] Comment on Building alexking.org 2.0, part 11: Monetization by … By What the E-mail Should Have Said Was…… […] as Belle (via Alex King) advises; respond with a link to your advertising rates (with a noreply@… e-mail addy, of […] Comments for alexking.org – https://alexking.org […]
I have no problem with advertising, and I donΓ’β¬β’t why people should have, if it is not flashing stuff in my face, even then there is a big back button up the top left.
I have found good stuff following ad links. I just wonder where the web is going and think the next 5/10 yrs will be interesting.
@Alex: do you only have TLA’s on your main page? If they perform the best, why don’t you use them on more of your site?
@Ozh: Would you mind sharing the code you use to target your AdSense at non-regular users?
I have TLAs on several pages.
@Alex: So, do you choose the particular pages you want to display the TLAs on and then enter each of those separately at the TLA site? Or do you run the same ads in all places?
The former.
@Rourke : incoming wicked plugin (my best plugin so far I think, the UI is awesome π
@Ozh: just poked around your site and couldn’t find that plugin? Mind posting or sending me a URL?
Thanks.
@Rourke: I said incoming π I’ll be releasing it in the next few days.
[…] is eventually rising amongst bloggers. There have been a few debates on this topic on several popular blogs recently, in which key ideas were along the lines of […]
[…] Building Alexking.org: Monetization […]
Thanks for sharing. I think text-link-ads without nofollow is against Google webmaster guidelines and could at the least affect your site’s authority distribution capability.
[…] that it would be trivial to make $7/month off of a blog, but after reading the following post (https://alexking.org/blog/2007/05/22/monetization) on AlexKing.org (www.alexking.org), I’m not so sure.ΓΒ Alex offers an excellent point of […]
Nice to hear how you do things Alex. The TLA debate will be an interesting one, to see what happens when google “finds out” for these sites.
Great posts about the building of alexking.org 2.0! Always nice to read this kind of quality information, without the BS and hype π
Thanks for sharing,
Robert
Truly, yahoo can’t compete with adsense no matter what. I would surely like to see a decent competitor, but there is none on the horizon as of yet…
As an alternative to AdSense, I recommend Chitika. Over the last year I compiled some statistics of my earnings and I actually earned twice as much with Chitika compared to AdSense. For those of you curious about Chitika, check out this Chitika review for more info and some screenshots.