Do Ugly Sites Earn More With AdSense?

[rustybrick]

An article named The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites was just /.ed, it says that this site made $10,000 in one day. Why? Basically because it is ugly? Why would ugly sites make more money according to the article?

Ugly websites are surprisingly effective in making money. As a person who puts business before technology, a profitable website is a website is an unbelievably attractive website to me.

But what I think makes for a profitable AdSense income Web site is a site that makes you want to click off the Web site. If PlentyOffish.com, is doing so well, in terms of functionality, then why are so many people clicking off the site on to ads of other dating sites?

Yea, ugly web sites earn lots of money, if their goal is for you to click on an ad to earn PPC. Do ugly Web sites earn more with AdSense?

[NevDull]

I'm with you on the willingness to click off to follow an ad. Frustration with the free service likely to cause someone to consider match.com, jdate, etc? I'd think so.

[hulkster]

My two cents is he hit a big market niche and "wins" via sheer volume - probably more of a driver than "ugliness.

I do wonder a bit about the $10K/day number, but having read through the WebmasterWorld thread, he seems like a legit guy - impressive stuff!

[gabs]

Almost 1million page views in one day..

The math would be $1 per 100 impression then.. Which guess the cpc i'd say he'd only need a 0.05% CTR..

So it's pos IMHO

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by rustybrick

But what I think makes for a profitable AdSense income Web site is a site that makes you want to click off the Web site.

That's the key right there. I have some ugly pages that are years old that make great revenue for that exact reason - they suck and when people get there they click on the best looking thing on the page - the AdSense ad.

One page in particlar was making about $100 for a year+ straight. Last November I decided to "pretty it up" thinking that would maximize my revenue (both affiliate and Adsense) and discovered that making the page look better actually killed my revenue. After a year + of $100/day the first week of the new design resulted in earnings being cut by 95%. I took down the nice page, uploaded the "ugly page" and revenue was back to normal the very next day.

I would really like to have a better looking/more functional page for my users by can't justify it if the revenue goes from decent to practically nothing overnight.

[gabs]

The other side to this is the fact that the ads can only be styled by colour (unless you one of the lucky ones) this can be classed as Ugly/don't fit with a styled site..

So you add some style to your site and the ads would stand out more as ads thus maybe less clicks.. ?

Its the catch 22.. Better for users vs higher ctr but then your have more users if your site is better.. ummm.. {time to sit on the fence}

[kermit_karma]

I also noticed this on my site. I run a tv guide site that I'm constantly modifying to provide a better service.

About a year ago I was using the affiliate mirago search results in conjunction with adsense ads in an old basic layout.

As soon as I started using a better set of search results my adsense revenue dropped.

Again when I redesigned the site to make it look nicer and be more functional, with loads of extra pages, hence loads more adsense ads (not excessive tho) it dropped still further.

I am in a real catch-22 here as I want my site to look nice and provide a good service but I want to make some wedge from it. If anyone has any other ideas how I can get the revenue back without being detrimental to the look and feel then I would be much obliged, maybe i'm just doing something fundementally wrong on my site!

[gabs]

Do you reckon google might think along the same lines ?

I still find the quality of broad search on google low (the best out of all the SE) but end up clicking on some ads..


The Auth site status must help google's rev as i'm searching for lets say a book and don't like the info i've read on amazon which comes up say #1 and #2 with then a list of kelkoo's and shopping.com alikes #3-#10.. but a ad shows up being very relevant to my search.. Bamm click google makes $$

[Sharpseo]

Originally Posted by hulkster

My two cents is he hit a big market niche and "wins" via sheer volume - probably more of a driver than "ugliness.

Exactly. This guy has GREAT search engine placement. #2 for "free online dating" on Google, which gets ~43k searches/day according to DP's overture-based tool.

Scobelizer's post about him oversimplified things. Like hulkster said, much more to do with a great niche (and traffic) + pretty good ad integration.

[dazzlindonna]

Ugly can help. But let me give you a potentially better idea, but just as effective. Rather than ugly, try SIMPLE. Simple doesn't have to be ugly, it just needs to be clean. In other words, don't let your visitor wonder what to do next by presenting him with too many options. Make it obvious what you want your visitor to do next, and don't let him get confused by 100 things on the page. It's not the only way to succeed, as crowded pages can be useful as well, but clean, simple, straightforward pages can point the way - to whatever - adsense, affiliate links, products, forms...whatever the goal is.