I’ve made an average of $50 a month from a 2 month old website using Google AdSense.
Everytime a visitor to the site clicks on one of the advertisements, I
get a small revenue. Here’s why I am going to stop using AdSense and the top 10 reasons I have for doing so:
- Straying visitors – each time you get a .03 cent revenue from AdSense, Googe is sending your visitor to another website, sometimes even to a competitor’s site!
- It’s ugly – having advertisements plastered all over your site probably doesn’t appeal to all of your visitors.
- Slow page loading – Each AdSense
advertisement requires data to be pulled down from Google’s servers.
While this probably won’t cause delays most of the time, I’ve had
instances where the rest of the page data wouldn’t display as it was
stuck waiting for Google to choose the right ads for me. - Causes display errors – In some rare cases, the wrong combination of AdSense and CSS vs the length of the page and how many images are loaded can lead to the whole page being garbled.
- Not a big earner – The guru of making money online,
John Chow, makes around $12,000 a month from his blog’s advertising.
Only $400 or so comes from AdSense. If such a popular, active site such as his can only pull in that much money, there is little hope of me retiring on AdSense revenue alone. - Dissuades potential advertisers – Everyone knows how much AdSense pays, especially other advertisers. If one should be interested in advertising on your site, but sees AdSense ads all over it, they are likely to think they can buy adspace from you very cheap. Not what I want.
- Show me the money – Search Google’s own search engine for such keyphrases as “Google canceled my AdSense account” or “I hate the Googie Monster” and you’ll find countless reports of users who’ve had their AdSense
accounts and revenues erased with a simple mail from Google stating
that there was suspicious activity. In other words, if a competitor
comes to your site and clicks your ads a thousand times, Google will
assume you are trying to cheat them. - Loses customer respect – If I want to buy something
online and go to the manufacturer’s homepage, only to be displayed
countless advertisements asking me to buy viagra or life insurance, I
will instantly think the homepage’s product is not good as it cannot
turn a profit on its own. - Not good for SEO – Many people who would usually
like to link to the content on your site, will think that you are just
writing your content to generate AdSense clicks and decide not to give you a link. I will always link to a site with no AdSense
before one which is covered in it. If someone writes for their passion,
not just for profit, I believe the quality of the content will be much
higher. On the other hand, if they have high paying ads on their site, I
think it reinforces the fact that their content is of good quality. - Aiding and abetting the Google empire – Google has
so much dominance over the web these days and are doing some really
great things. We already know they have been recording our search data
and private info over the years, one of the ways they manage this is
with AdSense. Each advertisement help them track users through your site and across the entire internet. Scary.