Are Google Ads Good for Your Site?

Google AdSense allows webmasters to place advertisement on their websites. Advertisements are sold, placed, and administered by Google in exchange for to payments to the website. I've been using AdSense since it was invented. Payments have range ranged from roughly $20 to $3,000 a day.

Google asserts that they like sites which serve quality content and that are uncluttered with advertising. However when I allow Google to serve ads on my site they tend to make my site's content look very cluttered.

Of course, I could go with another ad network or sell my own advertising. Indeed I had to do that after Google's Panda update, in 2011, which reduced my website's traffic by 75% overnight. Google mortally wounded many websites with that sledgehammer approach to website ranking. Google's near monopoly power make it very hard to simply ignore their ad network. That would as foolhardy as failing to optimize one's site for Google's search engine.

To combat the problem of cluttering a website, visitors are increasingly using ad blockers -- which Blocks ALL ads -- including the ones I sell directly. This reduces revenue, which reduces resources to produce quality content, which reduces traffic, and a death spiral ensues.

When one company controls both the discoverability of a website AND their ad sales, the result does not server anyone, other than Google. If Google simply talked to their webmasters maybe they could help improve the quality of the WWW rather than merely extracting wealth from it.

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I know Google owns YouTube and can bury this video. I also know Google can bury my site in search, as they did this with their Panda update, which took 5 years to recover from. But I'm tired, and I don't believe everyone at Google wants to continue killing websites... but I could be naïve hoping any of these people have any influence.