Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Do you think there is high probability that this schemes will be revived again and beat adsense. I hope not because adsense is great but looking at my 5 year historical trend of CTR, it is consistently on downtrend - probably because internet users are becoming aware of adsense ads and avoid clicking it.
I've also read from other forums that banner ad was also popular before adsense.
How does Adsense differ from that (other than the selection process)?
$10 a month for a site what brought with AdSense
$80 in first month June 2004
$540 as record November 2005
$70 per month now
The results are now lower, because content was trasnferred to the new created themed sub domains.
it was the 90's man.
What an era it was to be able to gain unfair advantage by manipulating the likes of lycos and altavista by using smart meta tags and keyword density
there once existed a species of webmasters building informative pages just to help others (the horror), the web was full of colors before Google, people linked to other sites freely, it was the 90's man.
Maybe I was one of them even in early 2000. When I built my first website in 2002 my only motivation was only to inform and help others. I easily gave and received links without thinking of the SEO and pagerank. The motivations now are maybe to inform and to earn money (I don't know which one is more important to most webmasters now).
Then ineffective banners emerged - to the most desperate sites. Meanwhile some started to monetize Amazon-type affiliate-thingies successfully.
Adsense/Adwords opened the net to the masses -- and now people mass-produce sites about topics they hate and know nothing about to make "instant" money.
it was the 90's man
Lol...yep, before AdSense I guesstimate 99% of sites could not monetise for several reasons:
1. Average Joe Company did not know how to advertise via the www and maybe could not afford to.
2. Average Joe Company did not trust giving money to complete unknowns for their advertising.
3. Average Joe Company had still not woken up to the reality the monster the www was to become.
4. In reality there was no functioning simple micro payment advertising scheme for average Joe Publisher.
The demand was there quite simply G put them all together.
A big discussion about Commonwealth network not paying.
One memember in a discussion forum lost so around $60,000.--
On my site complete anti targeted banners from casinos.
Simple, there was no advertising before Google invented it ;-)
No money, just for fun, it was great!
I still use both.
What an era it was to be able to gain unfair advantage by manipulating the likes of lycos and altavista by using smart meta tags and keyword density
JADE
Don't remember that name, I was into targetting AV, Webcrawler and anything Search Spaniel used!
People got to know my work and that brought collateral earnings, not directly related to my hobby... I think what worked is people seeing a serious commitment, instead of wanting money money.
I earned little money that way but unable to pay programming I had to get better at it, so now I know how to do some things and people hire me for that :) So as you can see, my website was for me, a business card of what I can do, the website didn't make much money per se.
Now I have several sites doing ok, but honestly, I do it for the love of what I do, and it works better than other friends doing it for the money (MFA).
In the early days people made sites (and paid everything from their own pocket) because they loved the topic and knew it thoroughly and wanted to share their knowledge.
.....
Adsense/Adwords opened the net to the masses -- and now people mass-produce sites about topics they hate and know nothing about to make "instant" money.
Totally agree.
In the early days people made sites (and paid everything from their own pocket) because they loved the topic and knew it thoroughly and wanted to share their knowledge.
.....
Adsense/Adwords opened the net to the masses -- and now people mass-produce sites about topics they hate and know nothing about to make "instant" money.
In the early days, I had no time and money to write each year more than 1000 pages, visit interesting fairs and projects.
In the early days 1997 to 2002, my main site was just 400 pages.
Now it's about 7000 because AdSense gives me the money to spend the time to create all this pages.
1998 had Greenpeace open statistics. My site was at this time about as strong as Greenpeace. But Greenpeace had a donation system and I had no money to invest enough time.
ASA
Basically the same things that make online business work today. For those that don't know, in the late 90's banner ads (even 468s which were common) could bring in as much as 8-12 bucks CPM regardless of CTR, and via ad companies.
The huge piles of venture capital that were invested trickled into the pockets of website owners and publishers who were professional, and took their jobs seriously.
There were other income sources, for example, a company called themestream that paid writers 10 cents per article VIEW if you wrote the article. Big money there if you could push traffic.
It was a more diverse market, and I'd hazard a guess that a lot of the people posting in this thread simply were not aware of (and obviously not successful with) the revenue possibilities of the time.
My main income came from getting people to visit a large search engine in the UK. My site is UK based so they were prepared to pay 10p per click through.
Before those my site was being hosted by tripod.lycos and they paid I think it was $1.00 per 1000 page view.
It was defiantly the love of creating an entity/property/existence on the internet and offer information that anyone on the planet can tap into. Luckily my main site was a ready made medium that adsense fitted so I have had a reasonable adsense income from the off. If it all crashed and burned in the morning then I would still have my site/passion/love/pet/hobby.
Was it better before adsense? Nah!
Oh, and how can I forget pre-AdWords "LinkExchange" and a million Webrings... :) No no-follows, linkback abuse, PR juice... sigh...
It was a more diverse market, and I'd hazard a guess that a lot of the people posting in this thread simply were not aware of (and obviously not successful with) the revenue possibilities of the time.
Absolutely correct, in the UK in the early to mid 90s we didn't have a clue and nearly all the ad agencies were still clinging to their exisiting advertising models and very, very few were prepared to accept that the www may possibly become significant.
This was made worse for us in that we live a couple of hundred of miles from any major cities and they sure as heck were not going to travel to see us about something they knew diddly squat!
I remember saying to a 19 year old colleague in 1994/5 time after returing from a holiday in Phoenix that we needed to get to the States to see how they were doing everything since I had been really surprised even at that time just how many companies were using URLs in their TV advertising.
However it was still a nigh impossibility to sell the web advertising idea to our industry until AdSense came along since we were perceived as widget suppliers and widget informational suppliers, not a bona fide publisher.
I think adsense is highly responsible for massive growth of the internet
I think not. I think adsense is highly responsible for pollution of the internet, much in the same way toxic chemicals leech into our drinking water.
That was a joke right?
