I've been working for two months on 10 sites that I developed specifically to monetize with AdSense. Now that I'm getting some long tail traffic to them, I'm starting to have doubts about AdSense as a monetization method. It just seems like you need a crapload of traffic to make any money with it.
I know I've read that we as publishers get about 25% of AdSense revenues. That would mean we only get 12.5% of the CPC we see in the AdSense tool. Can anybody tell me which it is? I've run PPC campaigns and Google charged me the same price for Content ads as it did for Search ads (too freakin' much).
I was feeling adventurous last night, so I slapped an AdSense block on one of my sites that's finished and has around 40 backlinks. First the ads looked great. Half an hour later they were somewhat off target and included local ads even though mine's not a local site. An hour later I had a big fat public service ad sitting at the top of my site. Needless to say, I took the AdSense off.
I'm thinking of backing off on the AdSense and just doing some longterm things to rank the 10 sites while I develop affiliate sales instead.
I'm sleeping five hours a night, I only go to the gym once a week, my friends want to know where the hell I've been, my eyeballs feel like they've been shaken in a bag of sand and baked in the oven, and my only income is from an affiliate site. I am unhappy because AdSense sucks and at this rate, I will never be able to get the new MacBook Air that I want.