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(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
You’ve already read the introduction to this part, right? 
Anyway, like I said there, one of the most common ways to earn a little (or some, or a lot of) money from your blog or web site is by having paid banner ads.
Those are not new, they’ve been around (and growing) since the late 90s. However, they soon reached a state of saturation, and users became almost “immune” to them, virtually “filtering” them mentally as they browsed through web pages. Even worse, the advertisers’ attempts to combat that were precisely the worst thing they could do – make banners harder to ignore by making them more annoying and intrusive. No longer were they a static 468×60 image; soon, they were animated, or used Flash or Java to be “interactive” (punch the monkey, indeed…), or had sound, or, even worse, came in new windows, the dreaded “popups”, which, until the rise of NetCaptor, Firefox or newer versions of Opera, were a nightmare. But the advertisers didn’t stop even then – their greed and shortsightedness told them that people were getting used to close popup windows quickly, without being “impressed” by the ad (they were right about that…), and, so, had to be forced to see them anyway – thus, the development of “popunders”, full page ads, “unclosable” popups, popups that opened a few more when closed…
And they had the nerve to be surprised when that made things even worse…
It wasn’t until Google and its AdSense network that things began to improve – amazingly enough, both for advertisers and for normal users – because Google did what was, at the time, unthinkable: make the ads less intrusive, instead of more.
Instead of full page animated windows with sound and which resisted being closed, AdSense ads were mostly text-based. They used Google’s search engine data to insert ads appropriate to the page or site. Their size and colors were configurable by the site’s owner, so that the ads could either look like they were part of the site, or stand out – it was up to the owner, not the advertiser.
You can guess the results – the advertisers made a lot of money, Google made a lot of money, and, most importantly, ads were bearable again. People who had sworn off ads forever found themselves clicking on some, and site owners who had given up on having ads because they bothered users and made them never return had a way to, again, win some money from their sites.
Both Yahoo! and Microsoft seem to be following in Google’s footsteps, as both are beta-testing their own ad networks. That can only be good in the future – lack of competition tends to breed arrogance, laziness and a gradual reduction of quality (just ask Microsoft ). But, for the time being, I’ll focus on AdSense.
Next: Adsense: the basics (finally!)
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Thanks again for the beneficial tutorial. And it is free!
Thanks for the compliment!
But the AdSense part hasn’t really started yet – part 11 of the series was an introduction, and part 12 was kind of a “history of banner ads”. I don’t know, I think I’ve always liked to tell stories…
I was a bit afraid that people wouldn’t appreciate this, and would only be after the “put banners in this location to maximize your income” tips, but, so far, no complaints.
This series is getting longer than I expected, though. And the next part will be a “dot five”, to fit between two past ones – I’ve just remembered something I should have talked about already. But part 13 will be coming tomorrow or the day after. Really.
Yeah, but sometimes they pay like just a cent or two for the ads. And it’s frustrating.
Dr. Fil
Sure it is. This takes time (probably a year or more to see any “palpable” money, and that’s assuming you do everything right – which you probably won’t, the first time), careful thought (about your blog’s subject, the keywords you use, etc.), good design (an attractive blog, the ads’ position, their type, their color, and so on), and, obviously, a huge number of daily hits to your site.
But all of those will be the focus of their own parts of this series, so, pacience, young Jedi.
The longer you run the ads and your blog, and receive hits, adsense goes up i’ve notied. The clicks are worth more as well, i’m not sure if this has to do with clicks or not. I know that my first click was worth about a penny, then a few weeks later and about 3,000 visitors later it was worth 0.09 and now it’s worth 0.17.
Topics help though, one blog my rate one time went up as high as $359 and I was getting $2.00 per click