Darren mentioned this the other day, and it’s taken me this long to have a look at Nik Cubrilovic’s original post.

Nik’s argument is that to make real money online, bloggers need to move away from AdSense-based models and investigate other ways of making money online. He cites Guy Kawasaki’s blog as a popular site that made a pittance from AdSense.

The basic intelligence is that AdSense doesn’t pay out big dividends, because your readers become blind to the ads and don’t click through. The problem is that the alternatives are quite difficult to get into unless you’ve got a hyper-popular website.

An increasingly attractive notion is selling advertising space directly. I’ve tried this, and it’s not easy. You’ve got to be prepared for frequent rejections, especially if you target companies who think blogs are small-time or amateur - you won’t get anywhere fast!

For instance, I run a blog that receives between 3-400,000 hits per month. That’s great exposure for a canny advertiser, but it’s harder to sell that space, so I’m still relying on AdSense. It’s bringing in a reasonable amount of money (~$600 per month), but my feeling is that it could be doing better with another solution in place.

I’ve looked at other services, like Federated Media. They seem really good, but turned my blog down because it was UK-based and they didn’t have the advertisers relevant to the region.

I wonder what other successful revenue models bloggers are using as alternatives (or supplements to) AdSense?

Via SearchEngineLand, Google have finally cleared up the issue surrounding image placement next to AdSense ads. In a nutshell, it’s a no.

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable looking at Google Ads with images placed next to them (especially prevalent on Photoshop sites). It smacks of tricking your visitors, and I’ve never employed that practice for that reason alone. I have to wonder though, if they’ll enforce this policy whenever instances are reported. From my experience of reporting splogs I’ve come across, Google aren’t very prompt about taking action.