Adsense - is it worth setting up?

I recommend listening to Podcast #64 of Stackoverflow where they discuss their disappointment in Adsense.

I also tried it on my personal blog where I get only about 50 visitors per day on the high end. In that case it's definitely not worth it and after a few months I ended up taking it down.

From the Stackoverflow podcast mentioned above:

• On the crushing disappointment of Google AdSense on Stack Overflow. The theory of AdSense, matching topical ads to the content on the page, is fantastic. The reality of the type of ads we actually saw on Stack Overflow is a terrible disappointment. They were barely relevant, and often quite ugly.
• Our hand-selected ads, targetted to our audience, perform 50 times better than AdSense. We believe that if Google could somehow tag a site with a specific audience topic (such as, say, “programmers”) it would do much better.
• If a site like Stack Overflow, which does almost a million pageviews a day, can’t make enough to cover even one person at half time using Google AdSense, how does anyone make a living with AdSense? Does it even work?
• Joel says the only people making decent money with AdSense are scammers who specifically build websites to do nothing except target high pay-per-click keywords. I am not sure this is what Google had in mind. It is a stunning indictment of “the power of the algorithm”.

Google themselves use the following measures, "clicks", "click through rate" (CTR), "earnings per mille" (eCPM), and "earnings". The CTR is how many people click on your ads, and the eCPM is the average of how much money you get per 1,000 people who look at the advert.

The earnings is the money Google pays you (obviously). What you need to do to work out whether it is financially worthwhile for you is to multiply the number of ads you can serve (how many 1000s of pages) by what eCPM you expect to get.

Example: if you expect an eCPM of one dollar, and you have 50,000 people a day visiting your site, you'd expect to get $50 a day. If you expect an eCPM of ten cents, and you have 100 people visiting your site a day, you'd expect to get 1 cent a day. With an eCPM of ten dollars, and 3000 people, you'd expect to get $30 a day.

Note that Google's terms and conditions forbid people from revealing either their CTR or their eCPM, so the hard part of this guessing game is finding a realistic eCPM figure. As for setting up the ads, that is actually dead easy. Google Adsense really isn't very hard to set up; there is a "wizard" which makes the HTML code for you and you just stick it in your website wherever you like.

Level of annoyance to users is a factor, but you have the following kinds of control:

• You can choose "text ads only" so that you never get any image or animated ads.
• You can block off ads you dislike with the "competitive ad filter".
• You can choose the colours, sizes, etc. of ads.

Other things you need to think about are that you need a privacy policy, and there is a "laundry list" of other conditions your website needs to fulfill before you become eligible.

There are quite a lot of rules and other stuff which you need to follow, so if your content is highly controversial or X-rated then forget it. There are also limits on things like what language your page may be written in, etc

I run a hobby website that gets about 140K visitors per month and about 5.3 pages per visit. I decided to put a few Adsense text links on it several years back and I have been totally surprised at how much it has brought in. I was able to place the text ads in a very tasteful manner that doesn't ruin the user experience.

It is not enough to live on by any means, but it is some really great pocket change. I know there are some people who claim to make their entire living off of AdSense, but I can't imagine what kind of site you'd have to build in order to do that.

So to answer your question. AdSense was totally worth the effort in my scenario.