Glad everything ended up well for you, though I still think big companies are raging clusters!

http://www.doshdosh.com/direct-advertising-sales-beginners-monetization-strategies/

If you like the idea of being able to set it up once and forget it, there are great options available:

*Yahoo Publisher Network — does contextual ads as well
*AdBrite — some people make less than with Adsense but some make much more
*Text Link Ads — you have to meet fairly stringent criteria when it comes to Alexa rank and PageRank, but if you are popular enough, you can make decent money with them.

I disagree with the poster above me. Signing up for different ad networks and seeing who is paying more is a fairly simple practice and could seriously increase the amount of money you’re making with your blog. I think that assuming that Google pays the highest is a big mistake that a lot of people make, and I frequently hear complaints of people making less than a dollar per month even after spending many many hours building content and optimizing for search engines.

My experience with Adsense was lackluster at best. I had a CPM of 76 cents, and even though google analytics was showing that I had thousands of visits and 15 clicks… I made 3 cents. This was in one week, and no I never used any questionable tactics — adsense just was not paying what I was comfortable having for my traffic. I tried putting more than one ad on my page, but the next day my CPM was even less and I hadn’t made anything. I yanked adsense and never looked back. I now have a site that makes way more money than with adsense.

It’s not a ton, but then I don’t spend much time on the site (it’s a hobby site — not my work site which I’ve linked here).

I would suggest taking a look at DoshDosh if you haven’t already. It’s a great site, with a lot of tips on making money with your website that doesn’t revolve around Google.

Mike, if I can make money with and for Google, then I can make money with and for another partner company. And perhaps, I can find a company to partner with that isn’t as difficult to communicate with should a problem arise.

Well, you can always give it a try, but it is well known that Google AdSense best performs in contextual ads so far, thanks to their large amount of advertisers.

To a certain point i can agree with you, but as far as it regards that “Google AdSense SHOULD tell their publishers whats their part of revenue because others do” does not make sense to me. Things are plain and simple, the rules are on table if you like it you play, if you don’t you quit and stand up from your seat.

I can’t understand why people want more, why aren’t satisfied with what they can have, with a great contextual ad program, with options that permit you to blend your ads within your site the way you want. Of course, all this does not mean you should not try other ad networks and see which ones perform best for you, but thats just for you, quitting with adsense for the reason that they don’t tell the share revenue they take it does not make much sense to me. Thinking to revolutionize how adsense has worked so far for so many years it could be tough. You revolutionized already the system and made the support staff to stand on their feet and dug into your issue. All this would actually motivate me to continue with AdSense (i repeat, i would not halt to change ad network but just with the purpose to see which one performs best for you).

Anyway, glad you cashed your check. By the way, did you got your new car?

Cheers and best regards.

Further, I’m displaying Google’s ads and serving them to MY audience. So, in this partnership, Google brings value by securing ad inventory, and delivering ads reliably. I bring the audience. Now, think about the models in other media. Does an ad agency tell the NFL how much it will pay for Super Bowl commercials after they run? Or does the NFL set the price for a 30 second spot purchased before the event?

Google sees it as appropriate to not inform me of the price before I serve their ad, or of the revenue split. Is this a partnership that is equitable for the value I bring to it? The answer is I don’t know, and Google wants it to stay that way. I don’t.

I’m looking for a different way of working with the ads that might be of interest my audience.

If anyone out there has ideas for making mobilejones.com profitable. I’m all ears.

Does it make sense to close your account if you are making money?

The whole genius of AdSense (in my opinion) is that Google managed to pretty much automate everything. AdWords for advertisers to input the ads. Algorithms to infer keywords from content in order to select the right ads. Self-service console for account management.

But not everything can be automated and so Google has to fall back on humans to handle the exceptional conditions. Like this one. And if they don’t have enough staff on hand to deal with the problems that do crop up, people get frustrated.

It’s not the people themselves that are the problem. In over three years of writing about AdSense on my blog and in my books, my occasional dealings with Google staff have been nothing but pleasant. Even when an April fool’s joke I made about Google letting publishers click their own ads was gracefully handled by Google staff after it tripped their automated click fraud filters.

As AdSense continues to grow, you can expect to hear more stories like yours. I suspect that Google’s decentralized management structure makes it harder to find the right people to fix the very odd situations like yours as well.

The other takeaway from this is to not put all your eggs in the same basket: if you depend on regular AdSense income, you should try to diversify that income stream with other sources.

Adsense is still one of the most profitable streams of income online, no?

Also on the revenue split, it either means as you said Google are not doing it fair, or else, it could be the split is based on complex changing criteria. If it’s the latter I guess they could say it.

Thanks very much for your initial involvement and follow up here. Yes, the Adsense people that I spoke with were excellent. But I have to conclude from my experience that the customer service system is weak and/or broken. It took extraordinary measures from humans to overcome the weaknesses in the system. Lucky for me they were willing.

Had it not been for the people involved - you included - this situation would have been more hellish by far.

Brian, Scott and Suzie were generous with their time and attention, but only after you got involved. If Google, or any company, ever doubted that they’re best asset is their people, this episode should settle that fact.

My frustration could have been expressed with humor or anger, and humor seemed the most sane to me, as you must admit, the thought that Google couldn’t cover a tiny check is absurd.

The money quote from the whole epsiode is this from Scott.

“We’ve learned that our payment system and what we do has real impact on the lives of our publishers.”

I hope this message is the one that gets passed around at Google over and above the technical issues.

I’m sorry that you had a bad experience getting your check sent to the different address and getting it cashed, but I know that Google did take your situation to heart and is looking at how to change several things about how address changes work, plus the timing/latency of changing addresses. It sounds like you got a chance to talk to Google folks on the phone for a half-hour or more about the situation too, so I’m happy that you got to connect with them and close the loop about how things were looking from your perspective.