Google recently added new case studies or “success stories” as they call them. These are mostly established sites that use adsense as either the main or the secondary source of revenue. They all look good, have nice and neat designs and lots of unique high quality content. Some are major news, entertainment or informational portal, others are smaller niche sites.
The funny part is most success stories start with a tale of how someone decided to make a site to provide some useful information for students/patients/stock traders and one day decided to try adsense on it – put a small ad unit at the bottom of the pages and was forever surprised by the high earnings:
Furniture.ie was founded in 2003 by Richard Moyles to make the process of finding products for the home easier, with the goal of saving people time and money by allowing them to search many stores from a single location..
Finfacts.ie is a business and finance portal launched in 1997 with the aim of providing content related to business and personal finance to the Irish market..
Livecharts.co.uk is a stock market data portal covering global markets. The site started out as a hobby site in 2005 and – depending on market conditions – now gets up to 3 million page impressions per month..
Spartacus Educational started life in a small office at the home of its founder and director John Simkin in 1997. Simkin left a job as a textbook publisher to set up his own company, providing academic publications online.
I guess that is the image they want to present to the world (that is the regular people are not into online marketing) and not the one of a growing number of people researching keywords, buying targeted domains, cheap content and links and trying to maximize their adsense revenue by placing tons of ads everywhere. Adsense turned content into online commodity and made massive amounts of low quality free content available online and profitable like never before. Not that I’d complain of course, on the contrary. However duplicity and hypocrisy rules as always.