Should You Use Google Adsense?

Probably one of the most asked questions by aspiring Blog Entrepreneurs and alike is:

“How can I make money with my blog?”

Most beginning Web entrepreneurs who have no tangible asset or service to sell are told to simply join Google Adsense and place ad blocks on their site, sit back and cross their fingers and hope they get lucky. Of course there can be much more to it then that, but essentially, that is often the kind of advice you will find.

Two articles I have read recently have made me think some more about the whole Google Adsense setup.

Chad Randall’s Advertisespace has an interesting post titled: Why Google is the World’s Biggest Pimp. I agree with most of what Chad has to say, and have similar views of my own (although perhaps not as extreme) about the whole adsense operation. I could elaborate further, but will leave that for another time.

The second article by John Chow, titled John Chow dot Com Income Report – August 2007 provides a roundup of John’s latest earnings from his site.

As John states, he started his blog about a year ago as a monetization case study to see if is was really possible to make money by blogging. Like many people, John started with Google AdSense as his sole means of monetizing his blog. In its first month the blog made $352.94. Now that is a pretty tidy sum for a startup blog.

His revenue has continued to rise since then, to the extent that in May 2007 he had a record $12,569.61 in total blog income. In July, this went backwards slightly but still earned a healthy $12,406.76.

In August, John’s total blog income was $17,828.61. Now that is nothing to be sneezed at for a blog income. The interesting thing is that of that income, Google Adsense accounted for only 3% of that income. While his blog income has increased massively, Google Adsense income has not increased anywhere near the same extent. John has now discontinued using Google Adsense on his blog.

Should you be using Google Adsense? If your blog is new, I would say yes in the early days. As you can see, I use it here on this blog. That is more to do with tracking stats then an expectation of earning any significant revenue from them. For this purpose, even on established blogs,using Google Adsense can be a good thing.

You can make money from Google Adsense, and many people reportedly make substantial amounts from their inclusion, but be aware that, there are other means of earning income from your blog then simply set and forget Adsense.

In a future article, I will take a closer look at the options to Google Adsense and other ways of monetizing your blog.