In travels through the blogosphere and reading the monthly earning reports of other bloggers, I have consistently noticed that the PPC programs (AdSense, ExoClick, NeverBlue, etc) are generally a very small portion of the blog’s income. I know there are many blogs that do very well with these programs, but most blogs do not.

I think the reason for this is that the majority of blog readers are also bloggers. Because of this, they recognize these ads for what they are and have the experience to know that it will probably not take them someplace relevant. No matter how relevant the ads appear, the landing pages for them are often not relevant at all.

Even with all the tips and tricks that have been posted about integrating the ads into your site and matching the colors to your site and all the rest, a well-trained eye can still see an ad for what it is.

However, I do see people getting fairly decent results and click-through rates from private ad sales. While these are still advertisements, they are of a different type. Most of them are a bit more direct and honest rather than trying to lure you in. When you click on an ad that was part of a direct sale, the content is generally a bit more relevant and attractive. You also have a bit better idea of where the link is going to take you.

These are just some observations that I have made and conclusions I have drawn that have helped me make the decision to remove the “program advertising” that I have had and go exclusively to private ad sales.

Having said that, I think that these advertising programs are much more viable options for non-blog sites. For example, if you run a site for a business or an informational site that has new stuff added perhaps once per month and is not running a blogging back-end (such as WordPress) and attracts more non-bloggers than bloggers, you could have some of these PPC programs on the site and the visitors would be more likely to click on them thinking they are going to end up someplace relevant and you could perhaps do quite a bit better financially from these programs than trying to sell ads directly.