I’ll admit, I’ve been an Adsense Junkie since the day it was released.  Google and I have been best friends in the past… I’d build some websites and put Adsense on it, and Google would slide me a check every month.

It was a match made in heaven…

Then last year, they started allowing advertisers to pay different amounts for clicks from their content network of which I was a part.  Advertisers paying $1.00 per click for keywords would be able to only pay $.05 per click for traffic coming from me.

Ouch Google - I thought we were friends?

Then came the “Googleslap” - that fateful day where Google decided (with their pinkies in the air, no less) that advertisers ads had to be “good”, and had to land on “good” pages… otherwise, they weren’t going to accept your money nor allow you to advertise on their precious seach network.

Dejected advertisers, no longer willing to jump through Google’s hoops, took their advertising dollars elsewhere.  The law of supply and demand kicked in, and with fewer advertisers competing over keywords, the CPCs for advertisers have been slowly trending downwards.

Earnings per click are dwindling even further for Adsense publishers in a lot of markets… Sites I had built last year and had been making $10 per day in Adsense were still getting the exact same amount of traffic, and had the same number of pages indexed, but are now making $1.00 per day.  Adsense on small-ish sites is almost a joke now in some markets, where, if you’re lucky, you might get paid 5 cents per click.
I finally bit the bullet and applied to join the Yahoo Publishers Network (Yahoo’s version of Adsense).  I had been reading quite a few horror stories about how it was next to impossible to get approved, or the approval process simply took far too long to get approved… but I had to do something.

Much to my amazement, I was approved for YPN in about a week.  Now comes the task of switching over my sites from Adsense to YPN.  I’ll let you know how it goes…

In the meantime, if you’re a publisher and you’ve been Googleslapped yourself, head on over and apply to YPN - you might just get approved :)

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