Macalua.com

Most “enterprising” bloggers have Google AdSense™ on their site. But not too many actually make money out of it. Some do, but just barely enough to cover their hosting costs. Then there’s the super exclusive UPS club who earns 5-digits (US Dollars mind you) per month.

So comes the primordial question: how do I make real Google AdSense money off my blog?

The sad truth is, you may never ever.

AdSense isn’t for everyone, just like Angel Locsin (hot! hot!) isn’t for everyone. Don’t get me wrong, technically you can make Google AdSense money off your blog (clickfraud cough cough). An AdSense click’s still worth something right? The thing is your income will not be significant enough. By insignificant I mean taking at least 6 months for your AdSense income to reach the $100 cut-off.

I hear somebody in the background saying, “hey buddy 5500 pesos is still 5500 pesos“.

You have a very valid point there, I won’t argue with you on that. But is it significant enough? I can probably make more in a month making pautang 5/6-style to the next fellow in need (I know my taglish sucks). So except for the only legit Pinoy power blogger that is Sassy Lawyer (I’d love to interview her from an Internet marketing point of view), I don’t see me or anyone else making signifcant income off AdSense.

I’d love for every Pinoy blogger to prove me wrong though. It’s just that the odds are stacked up against bloggers, Pinoy bloggers more so than others.

Let’s elaborate on that more. For the uninitiated, please use the page numbers below to navigate between pages.

Statistically Improbable

Jim Kukral makes some pretty strong arguments about why Google AdSense™ is not the best monetization method for your blog.

He gives the example of Weblogs Inc.™, the largest publisher of professional blogs, which maintains 70 niche blogs and averages 20 million cumulative page views per month (that’s a whole lot of traffic). How much does it earn? About $600 total per day from all of its 70 blogs. That’s an average of $8.50 a day per blog. This from a network that averages over 20 million page views per month.

He goes on to give a typical blogger-bitten-by-the-AdSense-bug case study:

Case Study: Typical Blogger Using Adsense
Let’s say your blog gets viewed by 200 users a day. Then let’s say that your visitors generated about 1000 page views. So essentially, your Adsense ads were displayed 1000 times.

Now let’s assume that you get a 10% click-through on your Adsense ads, equaling 100 clicks.

The next part is hard, because we need to know how much exactly you are getting paid for clicks, but Google states on their website that “we don’t disclose the exact revenue share.” So let’s make up a rather high number and say you get 20%, which again, for argument’s sake, let’s make a rather high number again and call it 10 cents.

All that being said, here’s the calculation:

10% click through rate (1000 page views) = 100 clicks
20% share of click rate (10 cents a click) = 2 cents a click

Grand total per day you earn with Google Adsense = 100 x .02 = $2.00 a day, or $730 a year

Not bad for a blogger looking to for a little extra cash right? However, not very likely either, here’s why. The majority of blogs are not going to maintain 200 users a day and an unobtainable 10% click through rate on a 365-day cycle consistently.

The numbers don’t lie, so don’t be fooled.