AdSense has always been ideal for small blogs as barrier to entry is so little. As long as you can get some traffic going, you can start making money right away, albeit probably not much in the beginning. However, there are changes in Google’s AdWords program that may tip the scales in favor of the bigger, more established websites. From Google’s Adsense blog:
“One of the main changes is the ability for advertisers to be more specific with their ad targeting through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. As you may know, contextually targeted ads will appear on your pages if an advertiser’s keywords match your content, while placement-targeted ads will appear if an advertiser has specifically selected your ad placement or site. Now, advertisers can target your site or placements, but can also specify keywords for them so that their ads only appear in the most relevant pages. These ads will still need to compete with the available inventory of ads for a particular placement, and so only the highest-paying, most relevant ads will appear on your pages. At the same time, you’ll still be able to use your Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from specific URLs from appearing.”
Google contends that this will mean more relevant ads for your site’s visitors and increased advertiser confidence, resulting in greater ad spending. These may be true, but mostly for those sites that are already popular. It remains to be seen if this will lead to a major shift in advertiser preference (big sites vs long tail). I guess it will all depend on this new model’s effectiveness.
“In addition, while advertisers previously could only change their bids for all ads running across multiple sites, they can now adjust their bids for individual sites. This means that advertisers can spend more of their budgets on the specific AdSense sites which perform well and generate high-quality leads for the advertiser.”
With this recent development, I see scraper-type sites nearing their extinction. As for blogs, they will now have to be more competitive with their site branding to get noticed, and targeting a lucrative niche will become even more important. Google’s certainly keeping us on our toes.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll have to look for a purple cow.
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