Would you build a business dependent on adsense?

One thing you can do to minimize the risk is to start a new company for each niche you go into. Or for every 10 sites or whatever. You can legitimately have a different account for every company so this would help keep your losses to a minimum should 1 account get banned.

That being said, I think it is probably not that smart to build a business around 1 revenue stream that you have no control over. What if google decides to pay out way less? What if they go out of business? What if they decided adsense can only be used on certain types of sites, certain niches etc....

It's much smarter to diversify on all fronts.

Having said that, I agree that adsense is a nice way to make money - it allows you to just build up content sites without having to think about selling. I have made good money from it for many years now and hope to many years in the future but I do not depend on it for my sole income and, in fact, am moving away from using it on any new sites that I make.

Lee

I think setting up different accounts in company names is good idea, Lee. Yes adsense does make me uneasy because of the dependence on google. However I feel you do have set up a business model which includes adsense in some way, so you can leverage it's targeting capability. Just be sure to minimize the risk should an account be closed down and have a strategy in place beforehand.

Google AdSense is great and I have used it for part of my income for a number of years, but I would never rely on it for a major part of my income. However, although Google is the major player in this field, it is not the only one. If Google were to ban you there are other networks that you could immediately change to. Why not sign up for one now and check it out, just in case.

To add on, if you are earning from adsense, you should have a decent amount of traffic everyday from SE.

Even if you are banned from adsense, using the daily traffic, i believe you will be able to build a sizeable list within days to begin your affiliate marketing.

It's all about traffic. Like Don said, if you have the traffic, and it's targeted, not only are there other contextual advertising opportunities, but affiliate offers, CPA, straight ad sales, etc.

More to the point, if you've built up an Adsense business, than you know how to build a site and get traffic. The world is now yours.

One word about the "new company for each niche" idea. That's a recipe for disaster if you plan on being legit. Aside from your own tracking and organization, you will have to keep track and file taxes individually for each one. And if you file multiple corporate returns for the same physical address and the same owner, you might as well just call the IRS and ask for an audit.

Mark

Mark

That's a great point which other posters have reinforced. Thanks for all your replies, this discussion has altered my perspective about adsense. I now, don't differentiate between an "adsense site" and a "normal site" but look on both sites as niches sites (as John describes).

What targeting adsense does do though, is that it forces you to do good SEO by going after certain keywords and optimizing them as much as possible, thereby achieving good rankings: These rankings can then be leveraged in many ways not just adsense.