In the last week I have received payments to my PayPal account from Yahoo and Kontera. I had given up on these more than a year ago as being low yield advertising. I have not logged on to these accounts in so long that the passwords are lost and the email address that I used then has been deleted. I don’t know how I made almost $200 from ads that I no longer show.
I used one of my junkier domains, since expired, to experiment with alternatives to Google Adsense. Yahoo YPN delivered generic ads that were not specific to the content and I had very low click-through rates. Kontera delivered commercial product ads that were not related to my content and cluttered up my web pages with spammy links.
YPN is an alternative to Adsense, but when I ran code to split advertising 50-50 between YPN and Adsense, the Adsense ads outperformed by a factor of at least 5. Since then Adsense is making about 1/4 of what it made before the latest economic crash, but I am not going back to YPN.
Kontera was a great idea. When Amazon delivered Kontera ads I was making a couple of hundred dollars a month from it. It was not overwhelming, but my sites tend to be bookish and the Amazon clicks were free money coming in. Since Amazon dropped Kontera, the click throughs were very low and the ads themselves were obtrusive. I make no money from Amazon, now, in spite of having a few ads scattered around my sites (like the Blue Oyster Cult widget over on the right).
At the height of good economic times I figured to make $10 per 1,000 impressions. Now it is less than a $2.
The world has changed. Adsense has crashed as means of making money, down from thousands of dollars a month to hundreds a month. My eBay partner network income has been recalculated by eBay so I make about 1/3 of what I used to make. My traffic is 350,000 impressions per month, but that has dropped by 1/3 in the last few months. It is time to reevaluate how I monetize my domains.
This website is just a way for me to discuss tech stuff without annoying my more serious readers on other blogs. Most people could care less about programming , SEO and website monetizing. I get a few hundred unique hits a day here. Perhaps I should run some odd ads here to see who clicks on them. Tech people don’t click on ads, though, even if they aren’t running adblock.