I have already expressed my opinion on Internet Ads months ago, so I would suggest you all to start reading from that, as I don’t want to have to repeat myself on this particular topic. What I want to talk right now is whether Ads actually work at all for things like my blog, or Autotools Mythbuster.
I’ll start by describing the “monetization” options that I use, and then talk a bit about how much they make, look into the costs and then take a short tour of what else I’m still using.
Right now, there are two sources of ads that I use on this blog: Google AdSense and Amazon Native Ads (edit 2022-06-12: Amazon Native Ads are now discontinued as a product.) Autotools Mythbuster only has AdSense, because the Amazon ads don’t really fit it well. On mobile platform, the only thing you really see is AdSense, as the Native Ads are all the way to the bottom (they don’t do page-level ads as far as I can tell), on desktop you only get to see the Amazon ads.
AdSense pays you both for clicks and for views of the ads on your site, although of course the former gives you significantly higher revenue. Amazon Native Ads only pays you for the items people actually buy, after clicking on the Ads on your site, as it is part of the Amazon Affiliate program. I have started using the Amazon Native Ads as an experiment over April and May, mostly out of curiosity of how they would perform.
The reason why I was curious of the performance is that AdSense, while it used to mostly make decision on which ads to show based on the content of the page, it has been mostly doing remarketing, which appears to creep some people up (I will make no further comments on this), while the idea that Amazon could show ads for content relevant to what I talked about appealed to me. It also turned out to have been an interesting way to find a bug with Amazon’s acapbot, because of course crawlers are hard. As it turns out, the amount of clicks coming from Amazon Native Ads is near zero, and the buying rate is even lower, but it still stacks fairly against AdSense.
To understand what I mean I need to give you some numbers, which is something people don’t seem to be very comfortable with in general. Google AdSense, overall, brings in a gross between €3 and €8 a month, with a very few rare cases in which it went all the way up to a staggering €12. Amazon Affiliates (which as I’ll get to does not only include Native Ads) varies very widely month after month, as it even reaches $50. Do note that all of this is still pre-tax, so you have to just about cut it in half to estimate (it’s actually closer to 35% but that’s a longer story).
I would say that between the two sources, over the past year I probably got around €200 before tax, so call it €120 net. I would have considered that not bad when I was self-employed, but nowadays I have different expectations, too. Getting the actual numbers of how much the domains cost me per year is a bit complicated, as some of those, including flameeyes.eu, are renewed for a block of years at the same time, but I can give you makefile.am as a point of reference (and yes that is an alias for Autotools Mythbuster) as €65.19 a year. The two servers (one storing configuration for easy re-deployment, and the other actually being the server you read the blog from) cost me €7.36/month (for the two of them), and the server I use for actually building stuff costs me €49/month. This already exceeds the gross revenue of the two advertising platforms. Oops.
Of course there is another consideration to make. Leaving aside my personal preferences on lifestyle, and thus where I spend my budget for things like entertainment and food, there is one expense I’m okay with sharing, and that is my current standing donations. My employer not only makes it possible to match donations, but it also makes it very easy to just set up a standing donation that gets taken directly at payroll time. Thanks to making this very simple, I have a standing €90/month donation, spread between Diabetes Ireland, EFF and Internet Archive, and a couple others, that I rotate every few months. And then there are Patreons I subscribe to.
This means that even if I were to just put all the revenue from those ads into donations, it would barely make an impact. Which is why by the time you read this post, my blog will have no ads left on (Autotools Mythbuster will continue for a month or two just so that the next payment is processed and not left in the system). They would be okay to be left there even if they make effectively no money, except that they still require paperwork to be filed for taxes, and this is why I have considered using Amazon Native Ads.
As I said, Amazon Native Ads are part of their Affiliate program, and while you can see in the reports how much revenue is coming from ads versus links, the payments, and thus the tax paperwork, is merged with the rest of the affiliate program. And I have been using affiliate links in a number of places, not just my blog, because in that case there is no drawback: Amazon is not tracking you any more or less than before, and it’s not getting in your way at all. The only places in which I actually let Amazon count the impression (view) is when I’m actually reviewing a product (book, game, hardware device), and even that is fairly minimal, and not any different from me just providing the image and a link to it — except I don’t have to deal with the images and the link breakage connected with that.
There is another reason why I am keeping the affiliates: while they require people to actually spend money to get me anything, they give you a percentages of the selling price of what was sold. Not what you linked to specifically, but what is sold in the session that the user initiated when they clicked on your link. This makes it interesting and ironic when people click on the link to buy Autotools Mythbuster and end up buying instead Autotools by Calcote.
Do I think this experience is universal or generally applicable? I doubt so. My blog does not get that many views anyway, and it went significantly down since I stopped blogging daily, and in particular it went down since I no longer talk about Gentoo that much. I guess part of the problem with that is that beside for people looking for particular information finding me on Google, the vast majority of the people end up on my blog either because they read it already, or follow me on various social media. I have an IFTTT recipe to post most of my entries on Twitter and LinkedIn (not Google+ because there is no way to do that automatically), and I used to have it auto-post new entries that would go to Planet Gentoo on /r/gentoo (much as I hate Reddit myself).
There is also the target audience problem: as most of the people reading this blog are geeks, it is very likely that they will have an adblocker installed, and they do not want to see the ads. I think uBlock may even make the affiliate links broken, while at it. They do block things like Skymiles Shooping and similar affiliate aggregators, because “privacy” (though there is not really any privacy problem there).
So at the end of the day, there is no gain for me to keep ads running, and there is some discomfort for my readers, thus I took them down. If I could, I would love to be able to just have ads for charities only, with no money going to me at all, but reminding people of the importance of donating, even a little bit, to organizations such as Internet Archive, which saved my bacon multiple times as I fixed the links from this blog to other sites, that in the mean time moved without redirects, or just got turned down. But that’s a topic for another day, I think.
Your Amazon numbers may be better than you think. You only use the American affiliate program, right? Then you need to do your numbers with visitors from the US only. (Also, I’ve only seen Amazon ads for hair-dryers on your website. Not sure what is up with the ad targeting there.)Amazon Affiliate can be quite tricky depending on where your traffic comes from. My websites see way more visitors from the US than Germany, but the German affiliate program by Amazon generates way more sales than it’s American counterpart. The Canadian program have fewer sales than the US, but those are of higher value. Amazon doesn’t provide any tools for showing the right region to the right visitor, so you need to implement and handle geotargeting yourself.You could try exploring alternative funding sources like Brave and Flattr (now owned by Eyeo/AdBlock+). I know you’ve written about and used Flattr in the past. They’re relaunched with focus on a browser extension that automatically “Flattrs” websites rather than relying on users to click on an embedded button. The new process involves verifying your domains with Flattr and adding one meta tag to your pages. The extension will then automatically assign credits to websites based on monthly usage.I have more faith in their new more-passive approach than their old model. It’s set and forget for users instead of asking them to do an evaluation of how much value they got from a given thing and then having them click on an embedded Flattr button. A potential merger with the popular AdBlock+ extension could give their platform a serious boost. Not to far fetched an idea as Google Contributor was just turned in to a service to compliment Chrome’s upcoming built-in adblocker.Brave does the same thing as Flattr, but requires users to change to the Brave browser and pay in Bitcoins rather than money.