Kumiko's Cash Quest

An interesting and unexpected outcome from yesterday's post regarding this site being banned from Adsense was that it resulted in one the highest amount of pageviews for this site....EVER!

While I'm sure that this can partly be explained by the buzz created whenever someone gets banned from a program, I believe that a lot of the increase can also be explained purely by the fact that this site no longer displays Adsense!

When a site serves Adsense and is actively seeking to make money from it, the goal of the site essentially becomes to get people to click on the ads and send them AWAY from the site. People who stick around on the site are more likely to leave your site through a link they find while reading a post - not your Adsense. I'll freely admit that when I had Adsense, I wanted you to click on the ads and leave my site. It kind of annoyed me when people started sticking around and reading the content!!

My ads were placed in highly visible positions and blended nicely with the other links on the site in order to encourage readers to click on the ads and make me a couple of cents. Those few cents that I earned were essentially the payment that I received in exchange for sending my readers away from this site and to another site. A heavy reliance on Adsense essentially made this site a "middle-woman" for sending traffic to other sites.I always felt that this created a type of Catch-22 with this site and any other site trying to make money online:

In order to make money the site needs to get you to leave the site...the best way to do that is to have poor content...but if you have poor content, nobody will come to your site in the first place...so you should write good content...but then people will spend more time reading your site and are more likely click on an "in-post link" rather than an Adsense link...so you should...???

Perhaps the middle-ground is best where your content isn't fantastic but it isn't junk either - and that describes a lot of 'rich-from-Adsense' A-list blogs!

What it essentially boils down to is that when choosing to display ads on your site or not, there is a crucial question that you need to ask yourself:

Do I want my visitors to stay on my site or would I rather a few cents in exchange for sending them away?

I chose to take the cents. But with yesterday's traffic spike, I'm not sure that it was the right decision.

Of course, it's very easy to write against pay-per-click ads once you've been banned and there are obviously monetary benefits to displaying Adsense.

But for those who haven't been banned, would you exchange those few dollars in order for your readers to keep reading your content?