How do people make money through AdSense/Advertisements?

I know this may seem like an odd question, but hear me out...

As a user of a lot of forums, I *never* click advertisements or AdSense links, no matter how relevant or interesting they may be to me. I just never do, and I know a lot of people are exactly the same way. Yet I hear stories of forums that generate £££ of revenue through these methods, and I don't quite understand how. Are these genuine clicks or just bots? Do people find subtle ways to get people to click?

Unfortunately I can't find out for myself because my forum violates AdSense T&C's (they won't allow sex and suicide discussions), which is a damn shame because it was going to be my main source of revenue. I'm actually quite stuck right now because I'm completely new to administration and have no idea what the alternatives are.

 

Hmm, well that's true, myself would never click on a adsense advert even if it was something that was targeted towards me.
But for adsense, I believe you get paid for impressions as well. So for the forums with a lot of active members, they'd be getting a lot impressions, which means a lot of cash.
However, there are still a few people who would actually click on the adverts if it was something that would definitely interest them.
Also, it is possible with a large community on a forum, people can accidently click on a add if it was displayed on your first post. They wouldn't get a lot of clicks, but still get a few which can be a lot of money from adsense.

 

I often frequent a gaming forum that has their ad placement right below the first post of a thread. It has some really flashy gaming ads on usually. Although I have not clicked on it, I do know that the webmaster gets a decent amount of earnings from the ads. He wouldn't disclose the earnings to me, but he told me it was good enough for letting the forum be on auto-pilot.

He didn't have to do much because it already had a lot of members on at any given time. I guess it really boils down to which niche the forum is in. A gaming forum seems to be a decent source of passive income if done right. I hoped that helped!

 

There are plenty of people who click on ads for things that genuinely interest them. Although it's rare, I have clicked on a handful of ads, no doubt.

Keep in mind not all ads are paid on click - there are plenty of ads, mainly banner image/flash ads, that are paid by the impression. With enough traffic, nobody *needs* to click the ads. The pageviews and impressions pay quite well.

 

Do any of you have any recommendations for what places to use for a small forum? Like I said in the original post, AdSense won't work on my forum so I'm basically looking for an alternative. I'd use BuySellAds and other similar sites but you need a high amount of of traffic and I doubt anyone would want to advertise with a forum so new.

I'm not in need of revenue yet, but it would be nice to just have something in place.

 

If your not Allowed to use Adsense due to the content on your site then why not try Affiliate Marketing. I read your Forums' topic is a lot about Sex, what kind of category here? You could advertise a Sex Toy Store or a product, an Ebook, Sex guides all sorts of stuff like that which you will receive commission for when one of your users signs up or buys something.

 

The forum isn't about sex; we just have a sexual discussion forum to talk about sexual health and such.

 

Web users these days are bombarded with ads, and AdSense ads in particular seem to crop up over and over. If I'm sort of interested in one and it's running on a site I like and want to support, I'll click it. I imagine many others will too.

 

I do click on ads when I get one that really interest me. Mainly when I get an offer for electronics equipment like oscilloscopes. I guess there are other people who click on ads when they find something of value.

 

I hate ads but even I click on them. It really is not bad as long as your site is not plastered with them.

If it is a good offer, and it ads value.... why not?

You want to get paid for your work right?

Its like all those people who register on your forum and want everything for free, and don't value the work you put in.

 

I generate money from Adsense. I don't think I would click an AdSense ad, but keep in mind you and I are not the typical Adsense clicker because we are online marketers. As long as a person is interested in the subject and the ad is written well I don't see why people wouldn't click them. That's why you can pick which ads show up on your site and which ones don't.

 

This is very true.
When we visit other sites we can pinpoint exactly what is an ad on the page and what isn't and we know that that particular site is making an Income from users clicking those ads. But we see them differently to normal Internet users, as we deal in Internet Marketting and advertising companies have a different mind set to a normal visitor.
To a normal visitor, an ad may just look like a part of the site or an intentional banner to help them to find what their looking for... So they click it and get information or a service that they've been seeking to find.

 

You probably don't click on them because you are a webmaster and at the back of your mind, you know that they are just advertisement, but for the usual web visitor, he or she may be tempted to click on the ad, and trust me, there are not so many webmasters out there.

 

Personally I haven't had a chance to do anything with Adsense as my account was closed which really saddens me and now they won't re activate it,my own fault I guess. But what I used to do is have them placed in good areas on my website, you need to have them placed where they are visible and not too annoying. You will need to also have them neat looking rather then cluttering up your front page or any other pages so that people will not get annoyed by them, if you use them in moderation and use good SEO you will then get the impressions and clicks that you need in order to actually earn some sort of revenue from them.

 

Well since AdSense won't work I'll have to wait until my forum has more traffic so I can submit it to websites like BuySellAds.

 

What about if I want to make those sections visible still? Is it possible to implement the code so it doesn't show on those pages, or will it still flag up with the Google Spider still indexing those pages?

 

Perhaps you could use a template/PHP conditional to check the forum id and then display ads only in ones where you're allowed to show them/that don't break Adsense guidelines? I don't think that's against any rules, and I'm pretty sure the guidelines only mention specific pages rather than whole domains when counting what pages you're allowed to display ads on.