Discriminate Authentic Adsense Revenue Sharing Programs From Pirates

In my last post: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing", we discussed how to choose among numerous so called adense sharing programs. The conclusion is only choose those few which have already got a large traffic base. The problem is how we can arrive at such an attractive list?

Of course, you can always try search on Google with keyword "Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites" and you'll get tons of relevant information. Then you can choose among them according to your own inspection and other people's experience. However, our time is usually limited. Thus, we can't afford to participate as many revenue sharing programs as we want. In my opinion, it's enough that we join in one or two best revenue sharing programs. The reasons are as follows:

• The purpose of joining revenue sharing programs is not to make a fortune. It's just to provide an additional income. If you do things right, the piece of income will be visible, but far from large. It's your own full-time work or entrepreneurship that you need to devote a major part of your energy to.
• We can't expect ourselves to be experts in every field. Those best revenue sharing sites operate in many different fields, including blogging, forums, reviews, article directories, social media and so on. It's highly impossible that you can maintain the quality and quantity of your content in more than two fields. For example, you may be good at writing high quality article, but may not be so good at producing videos. If that's the case, why not focus on the field you are best at.
• Copy right issue. If you participate in more revenue sharing programs than you can afford, a potential result is that you may start to copy others' content to maintain a regular upgrading frequency of your account page in each revenue sharing programs. In the short term you may increase your adsense income to some degree. In the long term you may end up with your account blocked. You're not safe even if you publish your own content in different revenue sharing programs, which is quite common in article marketing field, because some sites require exclusive ownership of your content.

Since we only need to select one or two best adsense revenue programs, the work turns out to be quite easy - We only need to select among those AUTHENTIC adsense revenue sharing programs instead of using some programming hacks to implement the revenue sharing function. By authentic, we mean those who have established formal official partnership with Google Adsense. Examples include Docstoc, Hubpages, Flixya, RateItAll, to name just a few. Even BlogSpot belongs to such an official partner of Google Adsense. It's just that Google is so generous that it distributes 100% of adsense revenues to its bloggers.

In the title of this post, we also mentioned one word "Pirate". Which revenue sharing programs belong to pirates? Generally, they possess the following features:

• Utilize self-developed code i.s.o Google Adsense API to implement adsense revenue sharing function. Need more information about Google Adsense API? click here
• Traffic is quite low compared to Google Adsense revenue sharing program's requirement: 100,000 daily page views.
• Link popularity is quite low
• Have a relatively short history
• In eager need of content
• Others...

Given the features mentioned above, you can imagine how much you can earn from their programs and how long it will take you before you reach Google Adsense's payment threshold. Then, you may wonder, how can I discriminate authentic adsense revenue sharing programs from pirates? Here I summarize several tips for your reference:

• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs can be seen from your Google Adsense account center in the path My Account - Account Access
• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs have 100,000 or more daily page views.
• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs never require you to register Paypal or other credit accounts to receive your share of your adsense income
• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs can usually act as your referrer to register a Google Adsense account if you haven't got one already
• Check with Google Adsense support.

From my own experience, I can tell you, if you make a right decision with regard to which authentic adsense sharing program to join and pay adequate efforts to operate your account subsequently, the return you'll secure will be quite satisfactory. I hope this post, together with my previous post: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing" will help you make a better decision when you want to join some adsense revenue sharing programs to bring some additional income.

Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing"

Google Adsense revenue sharing is a rather trendy concept nowadays. Lots of websites majoring in different niches, including blogging, forums, social media, video sharing, article directory and so on, all claim that they provide a share of adsense revenue to their users who are contributing contents. Some of them even claim that they distribute 100% of their adsense revenue out, which is quite attractive at first glance.

However, as a content contributor, one might concern the following question most: how much in absolute dollar amount can I earn within a certain period of time, let's say, a month, which is the pay schedule of google adsense program. To answer this question properly, we should first understand what factors drive the absolute dollar income you'll earn from a certain adsense revenue sharing program.

For the sake of easy elaboration, I'll use the following formula to approximate the absolute income you'll earn from adsense revenue sharing program:

I = N * C * R * P, in which, I represents the absolute income you'll earn. N represents the number of visitors that view the content you contributed. C represents the Click-Through-Rate(CTR) of the ads placed by the websites for you. R represents the Pay-Per-Click(PPC) rate related to your article. P represents the percentage that the website is willing to distribute out to its content contributors.

Based on the aforementioned formula, you can easily see that your adsense revenue is determined by both yourself and the website. For example, you can improve the quality of your article, so that the number of viewers for your article will be higher. Or you can optimize your keyword selection and density, so that the PPC of the ads alongside your article will be higher. However, the major determinant of your adsense revenue still comes from the website, since the number of your content's impressions is by far more determined by the popularity and traffic of the website itself. The quality and optimization level of your content play a role to some extent, but far from critical. With regard to the adsense revenue sharing percentage, which a lot of websites manipulates to exaggerate their adsense revenue sharing programs' attractiveness,  its impact on how much one could earn is really minimal.

Arriving here, you probably know how to choose among numerous so called adense sharing programs - Only participate the few ones who already have a large traffic base. Otherwise, you are making contribution to others' wallet without gaining a reasonable return for your content. 

Therefore, the problem here is where you can find such a list of truly attractive adsense revenue sharing programs? I'll deal with this issue in my next post. Please stay tuned if you are interested.

Why Your Google Adsense Earnings Drop

Not a long time ago I saw a guy opened a post in a famous webmaster forum, asking why his Google Adsense earnings were dropping gradually overtime, whereas at the same time his traffic remained almost the same and his site underwent not a single change. Well, as I mentioned in my previous post (Don't Go Too Extreme When Choosing Keyword For Google Adsense)
, Adsense earnings equal Traffic * Click-Through-Rate (CTR) * Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Given that the traffic and website are unchanged, the only factor that could have to do with his declining earnings should be PPC.

So why is his PPC declining? PPC, as the name told us, is the per-click price that the advertiser is willing to pay to Google in order to get his/her ads display in a favorable place either in Google search engine network or Google content network.(In reality, the PPC will be divided between Google and website publishers. Here for the sake of simplicity, I don’t distinguish between PPC that goes to website publisher and the one that goes to Google). Clearly, the reason that PPC is declining overtime is that the advertiser is paying less and less for Google’s Adwords. Why is that the case? Basically, I think there are three major reasons here.

First, online advertising industry is increasingly competitive. That means, advertising companies need to adopt every means in order to compete with each other. One direct result of the fierce competition between advertising companies is the lower advertising price that companies/individuals could enjoy nowadays, which in the mean time means that poor website publishers have to accept much smaller ad revenues than before.

Second, Google advertising network is evolving rather quickly. No matter the search network, or the content network, the volume of ad places is exploding at an unprecedented pace. As the demand and supply law of economics tells us, higher supply of ad places will lead to lower equilibrium price of ads, which is exactly the case for Google Adwords’ PPC.

Third, advertisers are becoming more and more adept at Google Adwords. As you know, the ad place that one’s ads will display in Google’s advertising network is not only determined by maximum CPC bid, but also by so-called quality score. Quality score is reversely related with the PPC that a company or an individual has to pay for Google Adwords program. That means, the higher the quality score, the lower one has to pay for advertising. Generally speaking, quality score could be largely increased by achieving a high CTR, writing a highly relevant ad text, optimizing the landing page and so on. Nowadays, a lot of people are so good at these techniques that they could actually lower their PPC without sacrificing the advertising effect.

In sum, it’s not surprising that website publishers earn much less from Google Adsense program compared with several years ago. With the increasing competition within the online advertising industry, the continuing thriving Google advertising network, and more and more savvied advertisers, there is not much a website publisher could do to stop the trend. However, it’s not the end of the world. Never forget the equation: Adsense earnings equal Traffic (Or number of visitors) * CTR * PPC.  So, here are my suggestions:

• Never sacrifice quality of content or service for the sake of any kind of short-term gain. It’s the very basic that determines your traffic.

• Never stop optimization and promotion work. Otherwise, your traffic or CTR can’t be high

• Always pay attention to new industry. New industry means not only less competition but also less familiar to advertisers, which might lead higher PPC.