Ugly Sites Make Loads of Adsense Income

Joseph Plazo | Sep 10, 2008 | View Comments


If you’re a blogger living off Adsense, chances are you’ve tweaked everything from ad colors, placements and sizes. You experimented with heatmaps, placed icons next to ads and even bought Joel Comm’s overpriced adsense books. But yet, your ads just don’t seem to reap the revenues you lust for.

I share your pain. My idea of the ideal adsense site is one that makes a thousand smackers a day. I don’t hit that.

say that A typical gadget/business site of mine made about $100 a day in adsense. I used the standard blogger’s format that embeds the ads inline flush to the left. It looks like this:

The ads are well blended and don’t annoy the user. It occasionally compels a few clicks and plunks $100 a day into the ole bank account. It definitely won’t land me in the fortune 500.

Then sometime mid this year, a happy accident occured. I was editing the adsense code of my site and my ads ended up showing this way:

Look at the page. It’s ugly, isn’t it? The page begins with the Heading or Title, then followed by my boxed ads. The body text don’t wrap around the ad, but goes way below, after the ads. Looks like crap, right?

I didn’t notice that my posts were appearing this way for some two or three days… that is, until I checked my adsense stats.

WOAH. Those past three days, I actually made $200 to $250 off the same site instead of $100.

Ugliness made people click!

Hmmm… I surmise it may have been for the following reasons:

1) People thought the ads lead to the main article, without seeing the following text (perhaps they used tiny eeePCs) and hurriedly clicked the ads to go to “the next page”

2) People hated the layout and wanted to escape the ugliness and clicked on the first thing they saw to escape the site.

After a few days of consistently making over $150 to $250 a day, I reverted the site back to the old layout because the high paying layout simply looked unprofessional. My earnings dropped back to lower than $150.

Seems ugliness pays….

What do you think?


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About the Author: Joseph Plazo is a recognized persuasion expert ... but can't persuade his business partners and clients to leave him alone.He is the author, co-author or creator of several best-selling persuasion, attraction and influence resources. You simply can't be persuaded to miss out on his massive library of free Mind Power downloads.

  • Does this mean i have to make my site uglier than it is? Crikey, i have some work on my hands!

    Great blog post, thanks.
  • <!--StartFragment-->
    Great article, thanks for the advice will definitely look at it for my next project.
    <!--EndFragment-->
  • I still struggled to promote my wordpress blog. I will take your advice to see how effective it work for my site.
  • I've always struggled to balance the potential adsense income with loss of focus on the main issues on the site (which make me more!)
  • Wow, that is really interesting.  I never thought the uglier a site looks, the more ad you can get clicked.  I guess it really depends on how they are placed throughout the page and if they are noticed by the viewer.
  • Interesting. I use adsense but I don't want to make my site ugly to make adsense work.
  • That's interesting. Did you notice if your Average Page Views or Time On Site decreased during the "ugly" period? I wonder if the short-term gain would translate into a long-term advantage?

    Cheers, Jon

    Read Jon's latest blog post....Salons for Sale - Business for sale websites>>>
  • Content is king..dont take me wrong but that what drags your readers and what interests them most
  • I wonder if any of it can be explained by the fact that frequent visitors become familiar with the placement of certain types of content such that it becomes visible to them.

    When you change that layout, and in particular 'ugly it up' such that it becomes even more prominent perhaps it draws the eyes of those users. I wonder if over time that uptick would level off to the click rate you're currently used to as people get used to those placements.

    Read kidlet's latest blog post....New Butt Freckle Toys For Kids!!>>>
  • Ive never really had any success with adsence, the most I ever had was $2 in one day, and my site was really ugly.
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