[taAdSense]

I definitely agree that revenue ad is on the decline. 3 years ago it was fairly common to average $300 days - now it's roughly half.

The current plan is to upgrade to DFP within the next few months and maybe try to sell direct ads to companies related to our niche which is extremely popular.

How did you find out how many of your visitors are blocking ads?

[lama-dot-io]

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[Guest98123]

I'm estimating ad block based on how many page views Analytics is showing for my pages with an advertisement, and how many ad impressions are being served. Analytics does a decent job at not counting any page views from bots, so I find it fairly accurate for real traffic.

Careful with DFP though. I used it for a while for direct campaigns, bid my own campaigns against AdSense, and used AdSense as backfill. If I had no direct campaigns running, I expected to see similar revenues to using AdSense directly on my site, since after all, DFP was just backfilling everything to my AdSense when no campaigns were available.

However, I saw a fairly significant decrease in AdSense, whether I plugged my AdSense code into DFP as the only advertisement, or whether I used the backfill option. I don't know why that occurred, but it was something like -35% for running AdSense inside of DFP. Perhaps it was slower to load going through DFP and ads didn't finish for some users, or maybe ad blocking software had a better chance of removing DFP+AdSense, compared to just AdSense.

If I was you, I'd experiment with using DFP, and using a custom solution for managing ads on your server. If you go the custom route, you can serve direct campaigns much more efficiently, so they'll load faster, and have a much lower chance of being blocked. Also, you'll be inserting the AdSense code directly into your site, instead of wrapping it inside of DFP, which in my case, lowered revenues.

Right now, I'm just running AdSense only. Last year I did a lot of direct campaigns, many of which were for larger companies, like nVidia. AdSense might pay $0.30 CPM on average for my site, and direct campaigns might sell for $2.00 CPM, so it sounds great on paper. However, most of my direct advertisers wanted to focus on regions like the US, Canada, UK, Australia, etc. Now, although my average CPM was $0.30 from AdSense, it was closer to $1.00 for those specific regions. So, there was potential to earn another $1.00 CPM using direct campaigns over AdSense, but then I had to factor in the cost of hiring a sales person to deal with all of these companies and to manage the campaigns, since that was nearly a full-time job in itself. Then I needed to invest time working with the sales person and reviewing data, so that was another cost. After it was all said and done, I figured out I was making around +10% in the bank after going through all the direct campaign effort, instead of just dropping the AdSense code on my site. It wasn't worth the trade in my situation, and now I just run AdSense.

However, I'm always looking for alternatives and I'll likely explore some subscription models in the future.