You would be very hard pressed to find many people using the Internet who were not already familiar with AdSense and the concept behind it. Indeed many of you are in no doubt earning income from AdSense right now-and or using AdWords to drive traffic toward one of your promotions or websites.
AdSense has become so popular that to some it is almost a religion, and the Great Google God can do no wrong. This type of thinking is of course reinforced by Google, and until recently they even prevented publishers from using many of the AdSense Alternatives that are available to the public.
The very notion of using any other form of advertising is to some as foreign as a visitor from Alpha Centauri would be. There is no need to use another when you already have the best-right? I mean if you own a Cadillac why would you also want a Chevrolet Aveo?
Actually-you may well want to also use an AdSense Alternative for the same reason why a Cadillac owner would want to drive a Aveo at times, to save money; in some cases, to make more money.
AdSense is a form of contextual advertising, which simply means that the ads fit the topic of the site. This if your article is about life insurance AdSense is going to deliver ads about insurance to that website. There is be no ads about dating, or travel, making money from working at home etc, o the ads will be all about the Insurance Industry.
This is of course just my opinion but it occurs to me that if you are selling insurance on your site, you just may not wish your competitors advertised on the same page. I do know you have the ability with AdSense to stop specific ads from appearing, but I can see that being a time consuming endeavor and one that you are bound to forget to do every day.
I recently read an article where the author made the claim that as high as sixty percent of the clicks made on paid per click advertisements were done by people on a whim. They saw a topic and spontaneously made the decision to investigate further. They may have been reading that page about Insurance and saw an ad about Dating or Travel or any of the other thousands of things that get advertised other then Insurance.
The use of contextual advertising is of great importance and is a vital part of many websites. I would never suggest giving it up. I do suggest, and do so with a great deal of passion, that you also include non contextual ads as well.
There seems to be a great deal of debate on this subject, however from my own personal experience I can state with complete confidence that you will earn considerably more money
Over a given period of time if you include non contextual AdSense alternatives on your websites and Blogs, then you would if all you had is AdSense.
I can hear the objections now; an ad click from other agencies just does not pay as much as a click made on an AdSense advertisement. There is no doubt that is true, however what you must look at is the fact that the clicks you receive on the alternatives are in addition to your AdSense clicks-you would have received no click at all had you not displayed that Travel, Dating or Dieting ad-for if we carry on the example we used above, all your ads were about Insurance since all you had are AdSense ads.
I do not want my site to look over commercialized; I have no room for more ads is an objection I often hear. Investigation almost always proves that statement to be wrong, I have many time found the person making it has three or more groupings of AdSense ads, often repeating the same ads in the sidebar as they have below the title or down in the footer.
Finding room for more ads is usually a very simple case of removing duplication. A very rare site may indeed not have proper layout for another ad source around the articles, however there are ad sources such as Kontrea.com that create ads out of your text words themselves, taking up none of your page space at all.
Therefore it is my hard fast belief that not using AdSense alternatives is in fact foolish,though a much stronger word then foolish comes to mind.
Good Luck and Good Fortune to you all.