Huh. I take my old blog posts and slap a big AdSense rectangle between the title and the body, and my revenue jumps about 500% – still peanuts but back to comfortably paying for my site hosting. (Now I can finally capitalize off all that ‘faceb**k nude’ traffic – replace the asterisks with ‘oo’ and you’ve got my most popular search engine referral term by a long shot, all going to what I’m sure is a rather disappointing blog entry.) If I had a site with some respectable traffic I’d optimize the hell out of it – probably using tools like YieldBuild.
One other thing of note – while doing this updating I was favorably impressed by AdSense’s new ‘Manage Ads‘ feature, which takes the various formatting and other variables out of the JavaScript and stores them at Google, referencing them with a unique ID. Lets publishers change ad appearance and options from Google’s UI, without having to mess with their own sites. Great for publishers who aren’t using a CMS to automatically inject these variables into their JavaScript in real time; a lifesaver for publishers who are technically unsophisticated.
In my opinion, any ad system worth getting excited about requires two APIs – one that places the variables in the ad call, for the more sophisticated people employing multivariate optimization, and one that places the variables server-side, for those who can’t easily manage the content of their webpages. Now Google has both.
