Have you ever wondered how much of the Adsense revenue you actually receive?

According to conference calls for FM Publishing’s network publishers (boingboing, metafilter, etc), obtained by Valleywag, the magic number if 43%. The FM Publising business guys claim that Google takes a 15% ad serving fee off the top, and then gives the publisher 51% of the remaining 85% of total revenue. To get the full details, you can listen to the call.

Google is making a huge margin from Adsense. I can only hope that Yahoo and Microsoft will gain some momentum with their contextual ad efforts and help push a greater share of revenue to publishers.

The new Adsense terms of service prohibits term paper related sites from using Google Adsense. This creates an inherent conflict between the the Adsense and AdWords policy.

A few months ago, I found out the hard way that Google was going to ban term paper related websites. In the Adsense terms and conditions released in the beginning of January, Google made this stance official by adding “Sales or distribution of term papers or student essays ” to the “site may not include” policy.

On the January 30th episode of ShoeMoney’s Net Income, Brian Axe of Google explained the change by saying:

I was going through a few posts over at the wickedfire forums today, and I learned about the AutoBlog plugin for wordpress.  This plugin allows you to specify multiple rss feeds and it will automatically parse the feeds into posts on your wordpress template. The plugin can even put the posts into wordpress categories if the rss feed is set up correctly.

My previous post on Adsense Tips was popular, so here are a few more quick ones.
QuickOnlineTips has a good post about the best Adsense plugins for wordrepss. The plugins of most interest to me were:

• Adsense Beautifier – Adds attention grabbing images next to your Adsense ads. I have seen a few people claiming this technique helped them to double their Adsense CTR. The program puts a border between the images and the ads, so that you are in full compliance with the Adsense TOS. You can check out the plugin at use if you check out the post pages on EarnersBlog.

Over the past few days, I have come across a few Adsense tips that are worth sharing:

• Using Images to Increase Adsense CTR – A user on digitalpoint forums quadrupled his Adsense CTR when he placed related images next to his Adsense ads. The thread gives an interesting view of the before and after layouts. In order for this to be in compliance with the Adsense terms of service, you have to have a border around the images or a line separating the images and the ads. I will not do try this on MonetizeTraffic, but I could see using it on some of my other sites.

Google recently announced their coop program. Coop lets you create your own vertical search engine and monetize the search through adsense ads on the result pages.

In my efforts to test a wide variety of advertising programs, I gave Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) a try. YPN is Yahoo’s answer to Google Adsense. YPN provides contextual ads based on the content of your website.

A few days after applying on the site, I was accepted to the program. Getting the code to place on your site is very easy, and the interface is similar to Google Adsense. One interesting wrinkle that distinguishes YPN from Adsense is that they also allow you to select ad categories for the ads to show on your website.

I have a three-step process for making changes to my sites. Although the process is very simple in theory, I have found that it helps to keep me focused.

 

1. Experiment. Even if you think that your site or blog is perfect, there are always new things that you can try. I have found that the short term hit in performance that you may see is more than worth it. For example, in the past few months I have tried running ads from Adsense, YPN, Adbrite, and Text Link Ads to see which perform the best. I learned something from each of these experiments. Some things you might want to experiment with are:

Jasmine, who used to work with at Kiwibox, recently launched Glamourite.com, a blog devoted to life in New York City. Along with 10 “Glamourites,” Jasmine chronicles nightlife in the big city. While I know very little about nightlife, I know about making money online. I recently gave Jasmine some suggestions to improve monetization on her site, and she graciously allowed me to post my ideas.
Monetization Ideas

• The adsense ads on the site have a gray border around them. I would alter the adsense code to make the border of the ads white, and therefore blend the ads into the site a lot more. From my experiences, this will significantly improve click through rates on the ads.

I have been experimenting with tracking Adsense clicks in order to increase the earnings on my sites. After reading this post about tracking Adsense clicks via javascript, I decided to give it a try on one of my sites. I did a quick search on hotscripts to find a decent tracking script, and I have been pleasantly surprised with the results.