Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I make 15K a month at AdSense

blackhatworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 84 posts

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#41

Post by weaksauce »

fredBuddemeyer wrote: post #17
cookiecaper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would he? This is essentially passive income -- a more traditional business requires more traditional hours and workload. If you have an automatic moneymaker, you don't trade that in for something you have to tend to.

yes but its putting considerable time and intellect into a very vulnerable asset. google inevitably changes the way it does things and then its time to start over. and with each keyword he is competing with passionate and dedicated people (the winning side of any war is filled with these) that view their efforts as something more than a hack or arbitrage.

It doesn't seem like he is spending that much time to accomplish this kind of income. He IS handling the interesting parts(data mining the google data.) and outsourcing the boring/time consuming bits of writing the actual content.

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#42

Post by cedsav »

gojomo wrote: post #38
cedsav wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised too. I don't see why Google would spent cpu time on this, and I can't think of a way one would be able to validate that claim.

why Google would spent cpu time on this CPU time is cheap, and it could be useful ranking information. Compared to an H1 tag, a graphical header is harder to create, so it shows a certain level of investment. If the words in the graphic aren't repeated elsewhere in the page, then the page author may be naive in the ways of SEO. But that could be good, because the savvy SEO people are all trying to pull one over on th…

CPU time may be cheap, but Google has billions of page and images to index. If they were able to extract text from images, they'd probably use it for their image search. I'm also not convinced that the header image is a good indicator of relevancy.

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#43

Post by cedsav »

run4yourlives wrote: post #28
tptacek wrote: post #3

This sounds suspiciously like A Real Job.

I think that's the kicker - he's providing a real service! People are looking for this information. He's providing it for them. The fact that he's choosing both what topics to provide and is not personally an expect and outsources is really more a product of an intelligent business operation that it is a nefarious idea. This actually sounds like something that could revolutionize modern media really.

He's not providing any useful service. He's taking traffic and ad revenues away from legitimate sites while providing low quality content, which wastes people's time (hence they navigate away clicking the only links available: ads).

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#44

Post by hardik »

cedsav wrote: post #36

I can't really blame anyone for making money on what is essentially arbitrage, but the bottom line is that they add no value to the system and they make it harder for legitimate sites to get advertising revenues (by preempting traffic and ad $$).

In theory, arbitrageurs will arbitrage away the gap until the margin revenue outweighs the cost. So, in a sense arbitrageurs are good for the markets as they bring them closer to "perfect markets".

As far as adding value bit is concerned, if the articles provided are worthwhile to users, then some value is created. (Although I feel very strongly against the idea of creating spammy blogs that he advocates.)

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#45

Post by alain94040 »

sidsavara wrote: post #39
sadiq wrote: post #10

Something I wondered... where do these adsense keyword lists actually get their data? Surely it's something google keep pretty close to their chests?

Actually, Google has an Adwords tools which allow you to estimate what it would cost you to run an ad. IIRC, that has estimated Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Thousand (CPM) columnns, along with estimated impressions and a sweet API to pull it all together. Many people estimate Google takes a 20-40% rip from the advertiser, and gives the adsense guy the rest of the payout. So from that you can estimate what the ad…

How much Google takes is not confidential, you can compute it from their SEC filings. Would you believe that they take 70% of the advertiser's money, and give back 30% to the site owner?

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#46

Post by 3pt14159 »

imp wrote: post #37

Just guessing, but this might be his Acai Berry website: http://www.acaiberryproducts.org/ #4 result for "acai berry", lots of small articles, and tons of AdSense.

If that is his site, then I don't really have a big problem with it. The information was semi-alright and it looked legit enough (although there were a-LOT of google ads).

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#47

Post by icey »

fredBuddemeyer wrote: post #17
cookiecaper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would he? This is essentially passive income -- a more traditional business requires more traditional hours and workload. If you have an automatic moneymaker, you don't trade that in for something you have to tend to.

yes but its putting considerable time and intellect into a very vulnerable asset. google inevitably changes the way it does things and then its time to start over. and with each keyword he is competing with passionate and dedicated people (the winning side of any war is filled with these) that view their efforts as something more than a hack or arbitrage.

I don't understand the logic that says you shouldn't do something because what your doing today may not be possible a year from now.

In the meantime, this guy is pulling in a pretty healthy paycheck; I would assume he will be better prepared than most to handle any changes that come up.

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#48

Post by Ardit20 »

coglethorpe wrote: post #33
russell wrote: post #14

I was intrigued by the $8 for a 500 word article. Some commenters were complaining that it was too expensive, but when I compare that with my consulting rate for my writing, it's a real bargain. I wouldn't farm out a technical article, but it makes sense for consumer oriented ones. I would spend more than that on coffee while I wrote. EDIT: does anyone know what the going rate for a well written 500 word consumer art…

Oh, they go lower than that, but you're not getting the kind of "quality" you might normally think of. It is more geared toward SEO and often in broken English. Using the acai berry theme, here's what you might get: Acai Berry Supplement When looking for an acai berry supplement for weight loss it is very important that you choose a good acai berry supplement. Acai berry supplements vary in quality so one might not s…

Yes, but looking at the way some people behave in forums it makes you think people are really stupid :)

So probably someone reading that article, one of them stupid people, which seems to be many, will think wow that article was so amazing it really helped me out lol

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#49

Post by sidsavara »

alain94040 wrote: post #45
sidsavara wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Google has an Adwords tools which allow you to estimate what it would cost you to run an ad. IIRC, that has estimated Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Thousand (CPM) columnns, along with estimated impressions and a sweet API to pull it all together. Many people estimate Google takes a 20-40% rip from the advertiser, and gives the adsense guy the rest of the payout. So from that you can estimate what the ad…

How much Google takes is not confidential, you can compute it from their SEC filings. Would you believe that they take 70% of the advertiser's money, and give back 30% to the site owner?

On average you are correct

For an individual click it varies.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/10/21/google-adsense-givi...

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#50

Post by mikeyur »

russell wrote: post #14

I was intrigued by the $8 for a 500 word article. Some commenters were complaining that it was too expensive, but when I compare that with my consulting rate for my writing, it's a real bargain. I wouldn't farm out a technical article, but it makes sense for consumer oriented ones. I would spend more than that on coffee while I wrote. EDIT: does anyone know what the going rate for a well written 500 word consumer art…

I have a couple friends who are freelancers (as well as myself) that do consumer-based articles. For a good 500 word article you're looking at $25-40, depending on the writer and topic. With a tech/gadget article you may only need to pay $10 for 500 words, but if you get into health/sports/fashion/whatever other topic, the prices go up a bit.
Post reply on HN