[Guest98123]

OP, we're close, I'm averaging 130 USD/day for 2016. It jumps all over though, and I might see 200 USD days, and 90 USD days, even though traffic and clicks remain level. It's from a single site. About 60% of my users run ad block (young, male, tech audience, mostly on desktop).

Ad revenues drop year after year. I think it's a dying business in its current form.

I think an API should be available for advertising. The API would provide the name of the advertisement, the description, colour scheme, image, and more. Then, developers can use that information to work the advertisement into their site in an attractive and seamless manner.

http://i.imgur.com/9ecRa5o.png

An example is above. Instead of having a leaderboard advertisement for Chrome, HN could get the advertisement details, and insert it into the site to resemble a post. Every site could then style the advertisement their own way.

I think it's less annoying to users, fast to load, users are more likely to read and click it in comparison to a banner they're blind towards, advertisers would get more for their money, and publishers don't need to destroy their site with gaudy flashing boxes that everyone ignores. It's a win-win-win situation, and my vision for the future of advertising.

Personally, I'm looking to drop AdSense in the near future and try alternative revenue streams. I worked hard to develop my community. I don't like pushing some ugly, irrelevant, tracking filled ads on my users, in exchange for a few cents on every thousand impressions. It's a business that needs fixing, because advertisers are getting ripped off, users are bending over or forced to install ad blockers, and publishers need to keep pushing more and more advertisements to make the same revenue they earned last year. I'm surprised Google hasn't been more innovative in this space considering it's their bread and butter.

[vsakos]

The "API for advertising" you described is called native advertisement and is already a thing out there :)

[taAdSense]

I definitely agree that revenue ad is on the decline. 3 years ago it was fairly common to average $300 days - now it's roughly half.

The current plan is to upgrade to DFP within the next few months and maybe try to sell direct ads to companies related to our niche which is extremely popular.

How did you find out how many of your visitors are blocking ads?

[lama-dot-io]

Hi taAdSense, I've built a tool that does exactly what you need regarding your site's adblock usage. If you want more info or wish to try it out, I'm giving away some free trial accounts to gather some feedback while the main site gets finished. Contact is: [e-mail]

[Guest98123]

I'm estimating ad block based on how many page views Analytics is showing for my pages with an advertisement, and how many ad impressions are being served. Analytics does a decent job at not counting any page views from bots, so I find it fairly accurate for real traffic.

Careful with DFP though. I used it for a while for direct campaigns, bid my own campaigns against AdSense, and used AdSense as backfill. If I had no direct campaigns running, I expected to see similar revenues to using AdSense directly on my site, since after all, DFP was just backfilling everything to my AdSense when no campaigns were available.

However, I saw a fairly significant decrease in AdSense, whether I plugged my AdSense code into DFP as the only advertisement, or whether I used the backfill option. I don't know why that occurred, but it was something like -35% for running AdSense inside of DFP. Perhaps it was slower to load going through DFP and ads didn't finish for some users, or maybe ad blocking software had a better chance of removing DFP+AdSense, compared to just AdSense.

If I was you, I'd experiment with using DFP, and using a custom solution for managing ads on your server. If you go the custom route, you can serve direct campaigns much more efficiently, so they'll load faster, and have a much lower chance of being blocked. Also, you'll be inserting the AdSense code directly into your site, instead of wrapping it inside of DFP, which in my case, lowered revenues.

Right now, I'm just running AdSense only. Last year I did a lot of direct campaigns, many of which were for larger companies, like nVidia. AdSense might pay $0.30 CPM on average for my site, and direct campaigns might sell for $2.00 CPM, so it sounds great on paper. However, most of my direct advertisers wanted to focus on regions like the US, Canada, UK, Australia, etc. Now, although my average CPM was $0.30 from AdSense, it was closer to $1.00 for those specific regions. So, there was potential to earn another $1.00 CPM using direct campaigns over AdSense, but then I had to factor in the cost of hiring a sales person to deal with all of these companies and to manage the campaigns, since that was nearly a full-time job in itself. Then I needed to invest time working with the sales person and reviewing data, so that was another cost. After it was all said and done, I figured out I was making around +10% in the bank after going through all the direct campaign effort, instead of just dropping the AdSense code on my site. It wasn't worth the trade in my situation, and now I just run AdSense.

However, I'm always looking for alternatives and I'll likely explore some subscription models in the future.