Company Blogs and Adsense…
I have just finished reading Why AdSense Might NOT be Best for Your Blog on Darren Rowse’s Problogger Blog.
Everything that Darren has said is correct – its some of the comments that I find odd. The post itself revolves around 7 reasons that Google’s Adsense program may not be the best money making program for your blog – finished of with the customary “what do you think?” question to his readers.
A few of the commentators feel that Adsense on a company’s blog is a bad idea. I think they have missed the point entirely. For a start – there are many different types of companies. Most firms sell a product or service and this generates revenue – Revenue that they can utilise for their future endeavours. Other companies provide a service for free and require other revenue streams to survive.
Digg, Reddit, YouTube and their ilk had venture capital funding and their business model (in the early days) was ‘maximum exposure’ and ‘maximum userbase’ with a view to being bought over by a larger firm.
No Funding
Firms that do not get or do not want to get venture funding have to grease the coffers with something. Most advertising programmes will not entertain your website/blog with their ads until you have a certain amount of eyes glazing over your pages – so in the beginning (i.e Zero Pagerank, Zero visitors and Zero Income) some would say it’s best to have something coming in than nothing at all. This is where Adsense steps up.
Darren Rowse started with Adsense, as to did all the other bloggers that are popular today. This is now their business. Darren has now stated that on problogger.net – he has outgrown Adsense. If he can optimise the space on his blog and capitalise on its popularity then obviously private advertising will return higher than adsense – so the change is simple business logic. This takes time though, private advertisers don’t come running to your door just because you have a website.
So – back to point – Adsense is the best place to start generating income for any fledgling company/self-employed/part-time blogger simply because it brings in money until the higher return avenues open up.
p.s. Even established companies find Adsense to be a valuable avenue of income – e.g www.translink.co.uk – This is Northern Irelands main train company with gross income of close to £1million per day. They still use Adsense on their website.
Categories: Ads
