Since March 2004, Dogster has been serving Google AdSense ads. For a popular website they never really brought in much money, but at least it covered my hosting bills. AdSense was never a real revenue channel for Dogster/Catster, but it has been the ONLY bulk-advertiser we’ve used that covered our hosting bill each month.

About a year ago, AdSense started allowing publishers to share their revenue (though not their effective CPM) and Jason Calacanis started sharing how much could be made … forcing me to see how little we were making. We tried everything including custom color coding, custom placement, font and color coding, improved positioning, even switching over to Revenue Science for a couple months. I’ve attended publisher seminiars the GooglePlex, speak regularly with my AdSense rep, and even presented at to staff on two occasions. Yet no matter what we did, our daily revenue never broke $50 a day. The reason Weblogs Inc. makes thousands a day and we were making tens was because information sites draw in people hungry for knowledge who are much more likely to click ads in hopes of finding solutions. Dogster and Catster are primarily entertainment sites, and social netowrking sites have far lower click thru rates. Another problem is that pet words are proverbial dogs when it comes to click thru values, they don’t even compare to gadgets, finance and health issues.

Three months ago we bit the bullet and started displaying 336×280 ads, their best performing format, directly in our non-subscriber member’s pet pages. This was a move we thought long and heard about if the extra revenue would be worth a potential community backlash. Happily we received only a handful of complaints, but I’m sure it that was due to coordinating advance and concurrent explainations and very open communication channels on the matter. The result was we finally doubled our daily rev, reaching $100 a day for the first time. Nice, but hardly encroaching upon our real revenue channels.

Of late, however, we’ve seen a couple traditional companies entering the AdSense markets and we had our first $200 and then $300 day. This is still a mere fraction of what successful AdSense publishers make and I expect these companies to leave as quickly as they came. But it would be nice if it kept up. A company our size can always do with a couple extra grand each month to pad the primary revenue.