Astute (or perhaps merely bored) readers will note that I’ve moved my ad service from AdSense to MarketBanker, a new service that is still scaling, but shows promise. As I’ve said before, I’m going to try out several services here, mainly to learn them in real time, and get a sense of what works, what’s needed, and what’s even possible. Unlike AdSense, Market Banker allows advertisers to actually buy the site directly, which is one of my pet peeves. So, if you want to sponsor Searchblog, click the link on the right. You’ll have to register as a Market Banker advertiser.
So what did I think of AdSense? Well, it wasn’t right for this site, as I expected. This is not a knock on the service, but truth be told, if you do mostly analysis and fast moving stuff with lots of disparate contextual hooks, the crawler is simply too slow to stay up, and the ads don’t really match well enough. My potential endemic advertisers, meanwhile, can’t really get to this site from AdSense. Most of the time I had pretty lowest common denominator stuff up there, and the clicks weren’t that great. I do know it works great for others, like Kevin and Matt.
Soon, I think I’ll be trying out FeedBurner’s RSS/Amazon service. Just off the phone with Dick Costolo, and man, there’s a lot to talk about in his RSS Business Models workshop at Web 2.0.
For whatever it is worth, the new ads get past Firefox’s Adblock using the recommended blocking strings.
I never see Adsense ads unless I turn off Adblock.
Will ad blocking ever become a mass phenomenon and threaten the business models of companies like Google? I doubt it, but it is worth keeping an eye on. Maybe a questions for the Web 2.0 folk?
Does ads sponsoring of the site directly John result in you having to keep a certain “on topic” focus?
I guess it depends upon what the advertser is trying to achieve, but “on topic” should increase your ad rates at a guess.
Only problem with MarketBanker is the fact that their servers are sometimes very slow and that could prevent your page from loading properly (or at all), depending on where you implemented it. They obviously don’t have the same equipment and coding expertise as AdSense does…
Ive recently signed up with them. I like the model, like the control, love the ability to see exactly where Im gonna be without having to worry about click fraud and all the associated costs. I pay the fee, appear on the sites Ive paid for and am therefore, assured of highly targetted ads on sites that *I* think are going to convert.