One of the great things people love about our Hungry Hacker website is the lack of obtrusive web advertising… the site is something like 7 years old now on it’s current domain, and it’s had exactly one banner ad on it, and that was only on one article page and was just to see how it performed. We’ve never had pop-ups, pop-unders or anything on it.
For the longest time we did quite well with eBay’s affiliate marketing network via Commission Junction (it’s now called the eBay Partner Network and run in-house at eBay) – we realized we were never going to get rich but we made a few bucks a month we could spend on new projects here and there.
Then a while back, they switched from paying us on a per-action basis (so if someone bought a PS3 from one of our links we’d make a few bucks), to paying per-click on a quality basis. Most of the people who read our site are looking for the cheap way to do something, so very few of them actually bust out the ol’ Paypal account on eBay. In fact so few of them do, our quality of clicks has been stuck at zero for months, which is terrible because I know we’ve sent at least some quality traffic their way but we’re still stuck at zero.
So I’ve been thinking about adSense, because apparently it’s pretty fire-and-forget, assuming you don’t get the boot for fraud clicks. The only things holding me back is that I won’t have fine-grained control over what the links are, where they go, or how relevant they are (as I do with eBay) and it’d kind of be breaking our site’s creedo of not having “super-liminal” advertising.
So combine that moral dilemma with the fact I might either a) make no real money on it or b) get booted for click-fraud like so many other legitimate advertisers seem to be doing, and it’s pretty easy to see why I’m dragging my feet.
Can anyone forecast approximately what the income would be? We’re down to about 2k visitors and 3k page views per month right now, and we’re not tracking ebay click-through rates at the moment, but in the past it’s been between 1 and 5%. I’m assuming that as fancy as Google’s system is, it’s not as good at picking out relevant stuff as a real author doing so, but still. 