Australian blogger Darren Rowse is one of the hardest workers in the blogosphere, maintaining or contributing to 20 different weblogs. His efforts paid off with a check for AdSense earnings in excess of $10,000 (US) for the month of May. It's a good reason to read Darren's work at ProBlogger, one of the favorite feeds in my RSS reader. His expertise and passion for his blogging comes through, and the comments usually add to the conversation.
Darren's success offers a counterpoint to a recent post by Jim Kural at ReveNews, who says AdSense has been a huge failure on the ReveNews blog, which focuses on affiliate programs:
Never try to run Adsense on a site that is read by people who are Adsense experts, let alone a site read by affiliate marketers. Geez, talk about a pathetic click rate. I haven't seen something fail so badly since "Gigli." Putting Adsense into our content was an experiment by me to see if it could work for us, even though I was pretty sure that it wouldn't, I had to find out. I've learned my lesson and have removed 98% of all the Google ads off of the site.Why is Darren succeeding while others are struggling? As Jim Kukral notes, the type of content is critical.
Darren says that three of his blogs are generating the bulk of his earnings, but declines to identify which three. Why the secrecy? Because successful AdSense niches are quickly overpopulated with "me too" blogs that make it harder for pioneers to remain distinctive and threaten to erode the profitable beachhead they've established by spotting the niche. "You see I�ve revealed in the past that my biggest blog is Digital Photography Blog and have noticed around 10 readers now have similar blogs," Darren writes. "Whilst I don�t mind the competition and try to build relationships with them all - there is also something to be said for a bit of secrecy."