Five years ago around this time was a really important time for Google. It was when they officially announced their AdSense program that would allow people to monetize their sites. Little did we know back then that AdSense would be as popular and successful for Google as it has become.
In their official press release dated June 18, 2003, Google co-founder Sergey Brin took a moment to explain the benefits of AdSense. He said, “Google AdSense improves the overall web user experience by bringing relevant, unobtrusive, text ads to web pages rather than disruptive, unrelated ads such as pop-ups and animations. By providing website publishers with an effective way to monetize content pages on their sites, Google AdSense strengthens the long-term business viability of content creation on the web.”
Since that time we’ve seen thousands of sites that use Google AdSense to monetize their content. Here at CyberNet, we wouldn’t be around if it weren’t for Google AdSense because they provide us with the largest chunk of income out of the various advertising solutions we use. While there are other solutions out there, we found that Google gives us the best results, so they must be doing something right!
Congratulations to Google AdSense on five successful years in business. It has opened the doors for many people and companies, and it looks as though there’s only more success in the future…
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
I am surprised to know the adsense success, with more and more people using firefox with Ad block Plus (which is largest downloaded addon) and greasymonkey script or styles for that matter. which changes the way any site can be seen.
Truly speaking I dont remember when was the last time i saw any text ads on any website?
A majority of users aren’t aware of add-ons like that though, and that’s obviously a good thing for sites like us who rely on advertising revenue to stay alive.
Too bad you have a tech-savvy audience, Ryan.
I’ve got an idea though. I’ve seen some sites display a message saying “please don’t block our ads, it’s how we keep the site running” whenever I had my ad blocker on. Perhaps you can do something similar on CyberNet. Just add a picture of a begging puppy and your ad revenue will go through the roof!
Yeah it does suck that our ad revenue is held back because of the ad blockers. Judging by the number of Adsense impressions versus our pageviews I would estimate that 60-70% of our visitors are blocking ads.
We’re on the fence right now as to whether we’re going to continue doing CyberNet full time. We’re definitely seeing good progress with our stats, but revenue wise it’s not where we’d like to be.
What? That’s horrible!
Ya sure you don’t want to try a “don’t block our ads, it keeps us going” message? Make people feel guilty about blocking your ads! It worked on me! 
Oops, said that backwards. 60-70% aren’t blocking our ads.
That equates to about the percentage of our traffic that we’re getting from the search engines as well. Which says that most people coming from a search engine doesn’t have an an ad-blocker installed.