Why I HATE Adsense (And REFUSE To Use It On My Website)

I HATE putting ads on my website and here's why.

Hey, everyone, it's Neil Patel here for another Q&A Thursday video. I'm here with Adam LaDolce from Viewership.

This one is from Albert Santiago de la Cruz, and this question is very pointed to Neil, what do you think of AdSense?

I hate AdSense, I hate YouTube ads, no offense YouTube, no offense Google because you're making good money from it and other people are as well, good for them. I hate Facebook ads because you can now monetize your videos on Facebook. I hate any form of banner ads. And the reason I hate ads is for one thing, well technically I don't hate ads, I like buying ads.

I just hate putting ads on my own website. And here's why I hate putting ads on my website. Number one, if I put AdSense on my website, I'm getting a fraction of the money. Google the middleman is keeping the other portion and there's nothing wrong with that. They're in business to make money too and they do it, but you as a publisher you're not keeping the majority of the money, or you may or who knows what the split is. But I don't think everything is crystal clear on how much you get to keep.

Number two, if someone continually advertises on your website, that means they're making more money than whatever they're paying you. And they're just not paying you money, they're paying Google money and they're paying Google more money than whatever you're getting. Which means they're making more money than whatever they're spending. So if they're making more money, that means you would make more money if you just sold a product or service like they are doing. To give you a good idea, Adam puts AdSense on your YouTube videos right?

He has over a million views, that's a lot. How much revenue do you generate from those ads per month?

About $2,000, $2500.

$2,000 to $2500 a month. That's not bad, that's a good amount of money. But with your YouTube channel when you first started off and you started selling info products and Ebooks from that same traffic, before you even had your own website, how much revenue were you generating when you did that?

Yeah like 10X that, easily, when I first started.

So he was generating $20,000 a month roughly. That's so much more than putting AdSense on your sites. You get what I mean right?

I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't use AdSense because I hate Google. I love Google, it's my favorite search engine. I'm just saying you would make more money if you created your own products or services and then you were the one who was doing the advertising. You don't wanna be the person at the bottom of the totem pole. You wanna be the person who's buying the ads. You don't wanna be the person who's serving ads.

Technically if you're Google and you're serving ads you'd be at the top of the totem pole but you don't wanna be the person placing ads on your website, you wanna be the person who is buying the ads because that's where the money is.

I also just one last thing on why I personally hate AdSense or at least relying on that as your sole source of income is that your entire livelihood in life is all dependent on this other company. Basically, Google is your boss. Like Google can fire you and they can shut you down, they can demonetize you, especially on YouTube and then suddenly your business, let's say I have known YouTubers who make $50, $60,000 a month from AdSense, you get demonetized, you're out. That's it.

There goes your income. And if you wanna do ads, you can use AdSense, but consider AdSense, consider direct ad sales, consider signing up for other media partners or ad partners, do direct sales, whatever it is. And by doing that, you won't be as reliant on AdSense and then you'll have income coming from multiple places. So if something wrong happened at least you'd still be making money.

That's it for this week's Q&A Thursday video if you want a question answered on next week's video, leave a comment below. Either way I'll answer it, thank you for watching, please subscribe, comment, share, like. I appreciate it, thank you very much.

[mubasharali]

That thing I learned recently. Thanks for confirming. I usually say, adsense is my last option. But now I will say, leave adsense

[harsherharsh]

just after using 10 days of adsense, i shifted to affiliate marketing...i saw no point in doing adsense when you can make more money thru affiliate marketing.

[jakkapongwatcharachaijunta]

After putting adsense on my website, I noticed my traffic from goggle analytics when down by at least 15 to 20 percent. Is goggle doing something?

[animeartist]

THANK YOU! I hate Adsense too and I'm so glad that someone else finally agrees

[XclusiveloadedTV]

Learnt something today, we should not depend on one ads network, rather multiple is good, incase you get fired on one. Thanks Niel

[yunusshaikh]

Hi sir, please make a series for beginner digital marketier

Thanks...

[psy]

Thanks neil, i got question, what is the best replacement of ads? I mean if get rid of ads, what is the alternative source of income? Sorry for my bad english

[AdSenseNinja]

@Neil Patel - I've made over $400K on Adsense. Some sites are just not made for product/service sales, and adsense is great.
That said, on my product site I don't use adsense ... but then again I sell AdSense WP plugin :)

[LesterDiaz]

I make a few thousand a month from Adsense, don’t hate the player, hate the game 😂 seriously though I also get your point.

[CreationCove]

Neil: "I hate youtube ads"

Also Neil: *Using Youtube Ads to make 30% of the money from his business.*

[eldonmirjah]

I hate ads on my blogs as well. I use Media vine, are you specifically regerring to ad sense? But what do you recommend? I get about 150k visits a month... That I create my own images and place them throughout the posts and have them link to a product/sales pages? I do sell a language course. Do you think it will be more profitable If i use images for affiliate pages? Do you even recommend that I use images at all?

[HafizMuhammadArslanBhatti]

After watching this, Google is going to blacklist you from their searches

[themanthemyth]

Hate them (ads in general) too, but use them anyway lol... Google adsense does pay you peanuts. I waited After my site reached about 25k Visitors a month, then I started to use mediavine, which is great... When it gets over 100, 000 visits, I'll consider adthrive, what do you think about those? .... But I'd rather do that than use Adsense... I still feel funny about "Serving" Ads though, so I totally get what you're saying.. I reduced the amount of ads that shows a couple of weeks ago. Neil, would you ever link to a resource if you see they are serving ads? Even if the content is valuable?

[ethanoshoko]

What tactic of SEO would you perform when a certain keyword you want to rank for has competition with very low/poor content but very strong backlinks and domain authority?

Especially when the website you are using has low domain authority + weak backlink profile

[revanthreddy]

Which is better high paying alternative of Google AdSense

[phoenixcreations]

yes, google is my favourite search engine, but adsense ? i hate it

[vesogry]

Any ideas on how can I monetize the Excel tutorial site without Adsense?

[samueldhinakar]

He who doesn’t know to milk his cow, loose cheese! Thank you Neil sir 🙏🏻❤️

[hareKrishna-wnok]

Hi sir, Which is the best affiliate for job career blog?

[FERNIELAB]

I only do youtube and adsense doesnt pay me nothing. They barely pay me like 10 - 20 dollars a month for their ads i put on my youtube. I don't really know how to use fiverr i just heard about it today.