Mention Adsense and you get different reactions depending on which side of the blog fence you sit.

Bloggers attitude to adsense

Bloggers are looking for ways to monetize their material and one of the first ports of call is Google. They are the biggest fish in the pond. On their Adsense journey, bloggers may think any of the following:

Adsense will make me loads of money now.

According to money making guru John Chow, he makes 10% of his $12k monthly revenue from Google Adsense. I also read of people making 50 cents a month, or nothing. Obviously, your mileage may vary as to whether Adsense brings you riches, or not. The key is, if you have a big readership, Adsense should earn you some money.

Hassle incorporating the code

Google Adsense code is based on Javascript. For WordPress users, apparently, a break tag is automatically added to every line of code you paste into a template, causing issues. It is the same with my software, Rapidweaver, and probably in others that I don't know about, (maybe you do?) Anyway, the options for Wordpress users are: to work some code monkey magic, or do as Steve did on his tech blog and use a special plug-in Adsense Deluxe.

Rapidweaver users should highlight any Adsense code included in a post and press Cmd full stop. What others do, I don't know. Either way, it isn't that simple a job to incorporate the Google code into your blog on a whim, although it is getting easier.

Design challenges to incorporate Adsense into a theme

Hands up if your blogging theme was specifically designed with advertisements in mind? The majority of theme designers seem to just assume that the blogger will work out a style and placement of Adsense ads once the theme is up and running. This reliance on non-designer input at the critical stage of ad placements must explain the dire state of the many blogs peppered with tasteless commercial Adsense crap.

I have to say this aspect of theme design is where the Pisstakers designer, Bonsai Studio, deserves a huge round of applause. The Rapidweaver theme was practically built around that one looping ad space that you see under the left side navigation bar. (Interestingly, it was not designed to incorporate Adsense ads, but that's for another point.)

Readers attitude to Adsense

I am a reader too, and I have a different Adsense oriented perspective to a blogger when I surf.

Euh, commercial ugly Adsense interfering with my reading time.

I go to a site that seems to have some good posts waiting for me. Bingo, shite! The first thing I have to do is process the fact that there is text that has nothing to with the title of the post, right there in my line of vision. Or, in many atrocious instances, the only text you see above the fold is a bank of Adsense ads, and you have to scroll down to start reading any content. Get out of here, loser blogger, next thought.

Euh, this blogger is trying to "make" me click away from this site

I have noticed that some bloggers don't want sticky content ie they don't want people to stay, but to click on ads. Fair enough, Adsense is your friend. But if you want curious and committed readers, be more judicious.

Oh, that's an interesting product in that list of ads, let me find out.

At last, a positive thought about Adsense. Man, I was really thinking about investigating a nose hair plucker, thanks blogger, here it is, and now I can leave your site and find out all about this amazing product. That is a positive, at last.

Conclusion

Basically, my take on Adsense is - use it in huge moderation.

And what is it with gurus on Adsense who advocate you use a layout where between 40% and 100% of viewers' first sight of your homepage is Adsense, and then woo you with the research that they get 10% of their income from those ads! Dumb advice, surely. For a 10% return you give Adsense 10% of your theme real estate, or if that space allocation won't get you 10% of your income return, advise people to not think so highly of the efficiency and usefulness of Google Adsense.

I know The Pisstakers won't ever be an Adsense whore, I don't have the space, for one. For two, I am learning that there are so many other ways to generate an income without stimulating so many negatives from readers. Think before you Adsense. What do you guys think of Adsense?

Tags: Google, Adsense