No clicks, no money, no fun!

If you’re familiar with pay-per-click advertising, as a publisher, you already know part of your business model hangs on wether your visitors are interested enough by your Google AdSense ads to actually click on them.

And if they don’t, your revenue tanks through the floor… and you have no fun!

It’s deceptively simple.

So simple that some publishers have tried wild tricks to get their visitors to click on their ads but if and when Google notices the scheme they find it to be contrary to their TOS, they’ll rightfully pull the plug and the publisher will have no more revenue generating ads to accompany their content.

Therefore, a savvy publisher has to think up a way to present unique, useful and engaging content for free in the remote hope that some visitors will be, at that precise moment, looking to know more about the issue at hand and be willing to spend eye-time on the ad zones… and then, eventually click on one of them.

Whew!

It sounds straightforward enough but a “normal” website can get around 1 or 2% clickthroughs on the total numbe of their page views so that means that for 1k “valid” page views, only 10 or 20 clicks might occur — hardly enough to pay the rent or mortgage. It might help pay the groceries once a month but that’s it.

Are a few hundred dollar really worth all the exposure given to all those advertisers? Do the handful of monthly clicks really compensate for the tens of thousands of “views” those advertisers got? Some publishers think it’s worth it but many other think it’s time to move on to a more serious source of revenue.

There was a time, in 2007 and 2008, when the pay-per-click model was bringing enough money for a publisher to make ends meet but that time seems to be over as the economy isn’t picking up like it should and to make things even worse, the visitors don’t even bother to click the PPC ads, anymore.

Even the advertisers may feel this is isn’t working out to good for them so that might explain that their short “pitch lines” are getting ever more agressive which, in turn, might turn off even more visitors from clicking. Talk about a bad streak, from start to finish.

So Google AdSense and others need to figure out a way to make pay-per-click ads attractive again, for visitors.

Part of the solution might reside in providing more control to the publishers such as transparent ads and more options for ad feeds so all ads don’t look the same anymore. Also, a better cooperation between Google and its publishers might do wonders. The official AdSense blog is a nice touch but it’s hardly as good as a human being taking the time to help publishers who really need it. The current support structure is somewhat complicated and might lead to publisher frustration.

In other words, the current system is working but it’s a far cry from what publishers need to live so things have to change to make sure that it’s not just Google that can have a little more pocket change, at the end of the month.