: Adsense - is it worth setting up? How much traffic is necessary for adsense to make sense?

@Harper822

I think the best answer is really: it depends.

If your site's audience consists of tech savvy people, like SO, AdSense is probably a waste of your and your visitors' time.

If on the other hand you have a website with 1. an active batch of AdSense advertisers and 2. an audience of people who are looking specifically for what these advertisers are offering AdSense can be a great way to monetize a website.

We're basically talking about RPM here. Revenue Per Mille. How much money do you make from 1000 page views? Google AdSense doesn't allow people to publish these numbers. So let's beat around the bush. I have run AdSense on a lot of websites and I've seen RPMs for different sites range between 0 (I guess this number can be revealed without violating AdSense policy ;) to something worth my effort with only 100 visitors per month. The only real way to find out is to try it.
(Well, once you have at least 30 visitors a month I'd say. And I can also add that you can probably stop trying if it doesn't make enough money after a month or three, with 100 visitors/month - and try affiliate marketing or hand picked ads if you're so lucky to get offers for those.)

If you do see some revenue for 100 visitors you can optimize a lot, it's not unheard of to tweak a 10x increase of revenue by improving positions, ad formats etc. Unfortunately AdSense's A/B testing "Experiments" require a LOT of traffic to be useful. It's better to just take a good look at your pages and manually put the AdSense ads in there. Plugins like Quick AdSense for WordPress can be good to get started but it's really not a good way to move forward. It's much better to spend some time thinking like a visitor of your site.

And then finally it depends (again, it depends) on what you're trying to achieve.


If you want to build a nice passive income stream AdSense can be great - if you don't do any flaky stuff it can be a pretty reliable source of income.
Forget about AdSense.forget about AdSense if you want to build a heavily scalable company (like SO).

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@Yeniel560

Adsense is very easy to set up and configure, so even if it turns out you don't earn much from it, it would definitely be worth trialling it.

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@Welton855

I run a hobby website that gets about 140K visitors per month and about 5.3 pages per visit. I decided to put a few Adsense text links on it several years back and I have been totally surprised at how much it has brought in. I was able to place the text ads in a very tasteful manner that doesn't ruin the user experience.

It is not enough to live on by any means, but it is some really great pocket change. I know there are some people who claim to make their entire living off of AdSense, but I can't imagine what kind of site you'd have to build in order to do that.

So to answer your question. AdSense was totally worth the effort in my scenario.

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@Samaraweera270

I recommend listening to Podcast #64 of Stackoverflow where they discuss their disappointment in Adsense.

I also tried it on my personal blog where I get only about 50 visitors per day on the high end. In that case it's definitely not worth it and after a few months I ended up taking it down.

From the Stackoverflow podcast mentioned above:



On the crushing disappointment of Google AdSense on Stack Overflow. The
theory of AdSense, matching topical
ads to the content on the page, is
fantastic. The reality of the type of
ads we actually saw on Stack Overflow
is a terrible disappointment. They
were barely relevant, and often quite
ugly.
Our hand-selected ads, targetted to our audience, perform 50 times better
than AdSense. We believe that if
Google could somehow tag a site with a
specific audience topic (such as, say,
“programmers”) it would do much
better.
If a site like Stack Overflow, which does almost a million pageviews a day,
can’t make enough to cover even one
person at half time using Google
AdSense, how does anyone make a living
with AdSense? Does it even work?
Joel says the only people making decent money with AdSense are scammers
who specifically build websites to do
nothing except target high
pay-per-click keywords. I am not sure
this is what Google had in mind. It is
a stunning indictment of “the power of
the algorithm”.

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@Martha676

There's a thread on SitePoint with people posting their AdSense revenue. They don't say their traffic levels in the thread, but it should give you a rough idea of the range of earnings to expect.

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