Thursday 16 November 2006

Earning Revenue from Contextual Ads: Some Key Issues

The incredible success of Contextual Advertising over the last few years is nothing of a surprise, given that Google and Yahoo have been involved since near the beginning and have helped to perfect the system.

Google's Adsense system and its Yahoo counterpart are a favorite technique of webmasters to generate extra revenue from their sites and blogs. The idea is simple. Post some content on your site, add a snippet of code to your html and the system posts a contextual advertisement subject relevant to your site. Every month, Google sends out a commission check. What could be simpler?

When it all runs smoothly, nothing. The problem is that the system is open to abuse. In order to generate maximum revenues, many webmasters have jumped on the bandwagon and have created literally millions of "MFA" sites with spam content just to rake in money for nothing.

Made for Adsense has become an increasing pain to many in the industry, in particular to advertisers concerned that their ads are appearing on irrelevant sites. And quite rightly so. MFA produces low quality leads which don't convert and this burns through their advertising budgets. And then there is the problem of Click Fraud, but that's a whole different story.

Allegedly, Google are lowering the amount payed out in Adsense revenues to certain sites due to their profiteering nature. This is due in large part to the MFA problem. It should also be pointed out that many of these web publisher have their Adsense accounts cancelled.

Ok, so the system is flawed in certain respects, but if the search engines make money and there are plenty happy advertisers out there what's the problem? The major issue is for those webmasters looking for something that will generate a consistent, guaranteed revenue over the longer term, with potential for growth.

The pay-per-click model will, I feel, evolve towards a pay-per-sale model. This is nothing new - it's just another term for affiliate marketing. So ideally, an affiliate program should provide contextual content for a vast array of products and have potential to develop revenue exponentially along with higher levels of traffic.

There is one such system which I have just discovered. It allows webmasters to leverage the selling power of info-products through Text Ads. It is called BetterTextAds.com. It is free to join and comes with a full selection of webmaster promotional tools that can help you to develop multiple streams of income for your online business.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some of these insights were spot on. GDI still ok except for the Italian Sports car deal. BetterTextAds were good...
http://bit.ly/E8ktG

Anonymous said...

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