webrampage

Yeah I’m talking about Google AdSense. Well I call it AdCents. You know why, right? You only a few cents (and dollars if you’re lucky) per day. Today I’ll just tell you a few things about it and hopefully you’ll stop using AdSense.

Now think about it. Is it worth it? Is it worth putting those (ugly) ads up for a few dollars. Do you care about your site more or the revenue from it? Plus do people even click on ads anymore? I don’t think so. CPM? That pays like nothing.

You have to stick the banner in your visitor’s face and just hope they click on it. Or you trick them into thinking its a link and make them click it. Either way, its annoying. You’re just shoving visitors out.

You can be a lot less annoying, but then you don’t get the clicks. I know there is a balance between them. I tried it and the most I ever made in a day was $3. 3 dollars? WTF? And that was just because I got lucky that day. Usually it was around $1.

Oh and remember the $100 goal? You need to make $100 before you can get your first check. Hmm lets do the math. Lets say you make $1 per day. So, it takes you 100 days to reach the $100 point. Holy shit! That’s like 24 weeks. I wait 24 weeks and I just make $100? And that’s even if I was lucky.

A lot of people just quit. They don’t have the patience to wait for that $100. A good example would be me. I have like around $50 in my account. I’m done with AdSense. I don’t care about that $50. There’s tons of people like me. But, what happens to the money left in the accounts? Google takes it!

And trust me, you’re not gonna make a few grand per day once your site goes big. Maybe you could. But, you would do a lot better with private sponsors. Do you see any popular sites using AdSense? I never saw one.

Oh and you might have seen those screenshots of people’s AdSense accounts showing that they made a few hundred dollars that day. Let me tell you something. Those are fake! People do it to get traffic and to get their name out.

Update: A few haters were saying that I’m just posting this because I don’t make money off AdSense. Well let me tell you something before you go into “bitch-mode”. Its not just me. A lot of popular bloggers are saying the same thing. The guy over at CenterNetworks was complaining about what they make from AdSense compared to their private sponsored ads.

I asked people on Plurk and if they use AdSense and if they like it. About 95% of them said they don’t like it. There are tons of people out there who are still worshiping AdSense. I call them “AdCents bitches”. When you talk shit about AdSense, they’ll eat up you up man. They would kill you. I guess its their only source of money and they consider it the “big bucks”. They’re just being loyal. These are the people over at DP.

And one more thing, I didn’t stop using AdSense on my blog because I wasn’t getting paid enough. I stopped because I thought it was degrading my blog a bit (and its ugly!). Like do you see any popular blogs using AdSense? Well there is a handful of greedy bloggers who put in both AdSense and private sponsor ads. But, that’s a different case. (/Update)

So, don’t hope to get rich by using AdSense. I say quit AdSense and start getting private sponsors. That way you would be making a lot more and the ads are probably going to be a lot less annoying.

I try to keep the number of plugins I use on Firefox down. Right now I’m using about 6 or 7. Today I’ll be making a list of the 5 really important ones. These are really handy if you’re a web developer or a blogger.

Okay here’s the list in no particular order:

1. ColorZilla

This is probably the most valuable plugin to me. Its a color picker. So, I can just use it to figure out what the HEX code of a colour on a site is. I use it when I’m making sites and I need to take different colours from different places. Get this if you’re a web developer!

2. FireShot

This one’s for the bloggers. I use this plugin to make all my amazing screenshots. It lets you edit the screenshots by adding text, adding shapes, pointing, blurring out, cropping, etc. It’s really easy to use, trust me. It (kinda) does everything Photoshop would let you do.

3. Web Developer

The name says it all. Its an excellent plugin for web developers. It lets you do a lot of things. Like editing the source, disabling CSS, editing cookies, disabling cache, hiding images, etc, etc. There’s just tons you can do with this.

4. Greasemonkey

Probably the most popular Firefox plugin out there. I don’t think I have to tell you a lot about this because you may have already heard about it. Well its a nice plugin. Lets you play with JavaScript on sites. And there are tons of scripts for Greasemonkey over at Userscripts.org. So check them out.

5. MeasureIt

Yes its a ruler. It lets you measure the height and width of whatever you want on a site. Really handy for a web developer. I don’t have to say more about this. You get it. You know what it does.

Yeah that’s it. Go install them and let me know if you like them. I’m sure you will. And don’t forget to share any of your favourite Firefox plugins with us.

I’ve been noticing something for some time now. People rush to get a VPS or dedi once they get a bit of traffic. Now that’s not very smart. I’ll tell you why by listing the advantages of a shared host.

Advantages of shared hosting

• Everything comes installed. You’re good to go.
• There is tech support at no extra cost.
• Your life is a lot easier since it comes with something like cPanel.
• Everything is point-and-click. No SSH.
• You’re hosted on a (very) good server.
• Can handle traffic spikes well (most of the time).
• Noob-friendly (and sometimes even idiot-proof).
• A lot cheaper!

Disadvantages of a VPS/dedi

• Most of the time you need to install whatever you’ll need
• Tech support is optional. You’ll need to pay a few hundred dollars just for that.
• No cPanel, Plesk, etc. You’ll need to pay extra for that.
• You need to know how to use SSH (which is like the CMD for Linux).
• You get what you paid for. So, you need to pay a lot if you want a good server.
• Can it handle traffic spikes? Depends on the server specs.
• Not noob-friendly!
• Its expensive!

Okay there it is. You can now see how shared hosting makes your life easier. You should seriously stick to a shared host if you’re new to all this. VPS and dedis have their advantages, but they can be hard to handle.

But hey, you can’t even stay with a shared host forever. You need to upgrade once you get some pretty decent traffic. I would say around 2K-5K unique visitors per month. It depends actually. Depends on how much resources (ex: CPU, RAM, bandwidth, etc) you’re taking up. So, its not exact science.

Another tip, if you stick with a shared host then get a dedicated IP. And I made a list of 5 great shared hosting plans and a shared hosting checklist. Be sure to check them out and avoid oversellers!