My Thoughts on Adsense

While surfing the other night, I came upon this article, more of a question really:

"Pay Per Click (Google AdSense to be even more specific) is the greatest business model ever devised. Why? Check out Google’s financials and you’ll see why. PPC is the most efficient, most profitable business model ever created.

That’s just my $.02. What do you think?" For the full article and all comments, click here.

Here's my comment:

For $.02 worth, you must have a low eCPM!

I have had blogs up for 23 days and have made about $30.00 from Adsense. My best earning site is actually my Little League Blog and my Little League team Blog. My “main blog,” The Hot Dog Truck, gets more views but does not earn like the two “extreme niche” baseball sites. I am new to this, but here’s my thoughts on the subject. Google (and others) have increased the ability of the regular schmuck to publish on what interests them, or, as in the case of my baseball sites, what serves the needs of their small but targetted audience.

My Little League site has relevance to about 1200 families of kids who play LL baseball in our community and possibly a few other folks scattered around the country (grandparents, folks who’ve moved, etc). The team site has relevence to 14 families-and maybe some team alumnae in town. Both sites are/will be used for communicating, allowing people to do game write-ups, posting coaching tips and posting photos in a more open (and FREE) platform than the League’s main site (which I administer).

The sites are already getting hits due to the links from our main site and the fact that there is increased traffic from the League site due to registration form downloads for the upcoming 2007 season.

This is a win-win-win Google has created in this case. They get to sell their ads into an extremely targeted, geographically specific, niche audience. The advertiser benefits because there is less “clutter” than from a broader reaching “tips on youth baseball” site or on a site that’s pitching products to a broad reaching audience. The publisher (our League) benefits from a complimentary (in both senses of the word) internet presence and an opportunity to earn some money for the League. My modest goal for the League and Team blogs is to be able to cover the costs of administering our main League website and to pay for the software we just purchased to do our scheduling.

Google’s going to win in any scenario but what makes this a win-win-win is the niche aspect. Our niche is small enough to be able to provide value to the advertiser but large enough to create value to the publisher.

Now if I could only get more clicks for the Hot Dog Truck…….