A lot of web publishers rely on Google's adsense program to generate some cash to pay their hosting and domain bills. Lately the cost per click seems to have plummeted. Basically the ass seems to have fallen out of the adsense market. When your earning $0.02 per click, it takes a lot of visitors and a lot of clicks before you even get close to paying your hosting bills with your adsense revenue these days. It's getting frustrating and I'm sure there are a lot of people out there frantically scrambling for higher paying alternatives.

With the way things are going I think the days of people proudly holding up their $100,000 adsense cheques and smiling for the camera are well and truly past. Who knows what's causing the drop? Some people blame the made for adsense sites that pop up like noxious weeds but I'm not sure that's the sole cause. Even filtering out these sites has made little difference to me. This trend is making other options like PayPerPost look very appealing for people who have relatively low volume traffic websites.

Take this example, your website receives 1,000 unique visits daily. Your click through rate is a solid 3% (which is probably a good figure for the average website). So based on that you'd expect 30 clicks per day. Even at an average of $0.05 per click this will only net you $1.50 per day. Compare this to the lowest paying PayPerPost which is usually around the $5 mark for one post. PayPerPost allow you to take 2 paid post opportunities per day (and they don't have to be from the same blog). Therefore, you could expect to earn $10 per day minimum via PayPerPost. That $10 is not dependent on receiving 1,000 unique visits either. You could potentially receive 1 or 1,000,000 visits and you would still earn $10. Clearly this is a very attractive proposition for blogs that don't receive the same number of visits as major websites. With the increasing number of low paying clicks via the adsense program it certainly bares thinking about.

Looks like the days of being able to fund half a dozen caribbean cruises with your adsense earnings are long past.