MFA (made-for-Adsense) gets a bad rap, because traditionally it's associated with spammy content and black-hat SEO practices, but designing content-based businesses around monetizing search traffic is much more downturn-immune than, for example, the Gawker model.

Our site has just started to take off (now in the ~50,000 uniques / month range, up from about 30,000 last month and 15,000 the previous month) and the only monetization that works for us is AdSense and Amazon Affiliates. The display ad networks we've experimented with can't begin to come close to the eCPMs we achieve, and that's without a great deal of optimization.

The thing is, most people are still thinking about questions such as how to sell advertising against their content, rather than how to shift their mindset to serve ads to a different kind of audience.

I'm not suggesting that sites with a large regular community aren't important, but that they need to be combined with a monetization strategy that isn't about having a sales guy / sales force, a media kit and a bunch of traditional sponsorship and banner placement options.

Will spending on Google dry up and result in dwindling AdSense eCPMs? Possibly, but more likely that will hit those using AdSense purely as a last resort supplement with very little thought given to placement and SEO.

MFA (made-for-Adsense) gets a bad rap, because traditionally it's associated with spammy content and black-hat SEO practices, but designing content-based businesses around monetizing search traffic is much more downturn-immune than, for example, the Gawker model.

Our site has just started to take off (now in the ~50,000 uniques / month range, up from about 30,000 last month and 15,000 the previous month) and the only monetization that works for us is AdSense and Amazon Affiliates. The display ad networks we've experimented with can't begin to come close to the eCPMs we achieve, and that's without a great deal of optimization.

The thing is, most people are still thinking about questions such as how to sell advertising against their content, rather than how to shift their mindset to serve ads to a different kind of audience.

I'm not suggesting that sites with a large regular community aren't important, but that they need to be combined with a monetization strategy that isn't about having a sales guy / sales force, a media kit and a bunch of traditional sponsorship and banner placement options.

Will spending on Google dry up and result in dwindling AdSense eCPMs? Possibly, but more likely that will hit those using AdSense purely as a last resort supplement with very little thought given to placement and SEO.