I’ve been running Google Adsense on Lawfinder for a few months now – mainly in the interests of research, though it does become seductive. I’ve also followed up on some of the research, blogs and forums about it. Here are my findings:

The vast majority of Adsense accounts earn less than $50 per month and the average is less than $20. There can be no business case for such a pathetic return (except Google’s business case, of course – Goog earns $100s of millions a month from these pathetic accounts). Even if you’re an impecunious student, there are better ways to earn $20.

To make bigger bucks you need to optimise your site for Adsense – or, to put it more forcefully, to prostitute your site in pursuit of mammon. Optimising for Adsense involves, firstly, placing as many instances as Google allows in optimal positions on your pages, choosing the ad formats and tweaking the colours etc to blend in with your site and maximise the likelihood of an ad click (advertent or inadvertent). Secondly, adjusting the content of your pages and creating additional pages to improve the number of page views achieved and the relevance of the ads served.

If you provide products and services, why run Adsense? Optimise your site to sell your own products and services, not to earn pennies advertising others’ products and services.

I’d classify those who do make good money from Adsense as follows, though the dividing line between the categories is fuzzy at best:

(a) You create lots of great content and generate good traffic from that. Good luck to you. Advertising is a valid and perhaps necessary way to support your service.

(b) You run a “professional” blog, a review site, a price comparison site or some such, specifically designed to generate Adsense and other affiliate revenue. You are producing something superficially useful but generally derivative and self-serving only.

(c) You are the lowest form of life, engaging in link farming or splogging, polluting the internet and making us wish Larry and Sergey had never been born.

Here are some others who agree that it’s all adnonsense.