Finding an alternative to adsense

Is there any people here that makes other way to make monitization ? Adsense wont approve my request and im planning to change adsense to something (some says adsense gives small amount)

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It all depends on the purpose of your community. Some do well from subscriptions or membership.

Third party advertising rates are at an all-time low. These days they feel more like a last resort.

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From personal experience, the Amazon affiliate program is much more profitable than Google’s Adsense. There is a Discourse plugin that automatically converts any Amazon link posted in your forum to include your affiliate ID code in the URL. However, I would say it’s better to use both monetization methods. The official advertising plugin includes support for a few different services and custom code so you can use any service.

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Thank you for your thoughts guys, guess i just stick by donations for now because adsense doesn’t approve my application.

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Dear @R_X

Frankly speaking, there are myriad alternatives to Adsense for display ads. In fact, we have not run Adsense (directly) on our site in many years.

If, for example, you Google something like:

top CPM ad networks 2020

You will have enough results to boggle the mind. Here is but one example, picked at random.

Congratulate yourself if Adsense has rejected your site and go choose an ad network which accepts you! :slight_smile:

Cheers!

Please note that because of the global pandemic, CPM ads seems to be “in the gutter” this year; so now is really a good time to focus on developing content, apps and features for your site.

HTH

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It’s super easy to get approved by Adsense. You have to make sure you are following their terms. Your website will need a few things required by the program, you will need to do a little research into what is required. Their website lists the things required to be accepted.

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Like sell your soul. :slightly_smiling_face:

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If you have valuable content and this is public, adsense is (my) best option.
If you have private content (only for members), I use paypal for subscribers, annual / monthly incoming, and :moneybag: to join for private content. For me, the best option.

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One interesting alternative that I’ve seen is what the social media platform “cent” is doing. Basically every post in the website has a button for donation, you can press it as many times as you want and you will be adding one cent with every click. You can also go to a user’s profile and seed them money, this agreement lasts for a month and you are paying a certain amount of money per day for the month.

Though I don’t agree specifically on the choice of technology (they have implemented their platform using blockchain, specifically ethereum). I think the idea of people being able to simply pay per post or to seed users for a longer time is a great idea. Something similar could be done for platforms like these. I think people are a bit stingy with giving out their money, but with cent you are just giving a cent, it really feels like not much. You would load up your account with, say, 3 or 4 dollars and that’s already 300 to 400 likes that you can give out.

Obviously a website like a forum would probably take 10% or so of the money that is circulating in order to finance itself. Most would go to users but you can always adjust the ratio I guess.

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What kind of PageRPM should you expect to get with discourse? I have about 700,000 monthly page views in Google Analytics but getting a fraction of those page views in AdSense, wonder if anyone has tips for how best to set it up, eg for the threads themselves ads at the bottom will be seen more then at the top, as people jump back into the conversation over and over to see if someone has replied - so better to have ads at the end and not at the top or is both okay?

Is it worth having more than one advertiser set up using the ad plugin tool? does mixing it up help to serve more ads?

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Well, banning bots will fix your pageviews closer reality :wink:

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Google Analytics says I had 30K Page views on Monday - AdSense says I had 6.7K

Would that much of it be bots? I dont think my users are tech savvy enough to have AdBlockers. Not that many of them anyways.

Discourse Dashboard says I had 60K Page Views on Monday, made up of 23K logged in, 24K Anon users and 12K Crawlers.

How do you clear out bots?

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Try these two ways as posted by @awesomerobot. The 2nd method should knock some out for you. (Which reminds me to add a couple more to my blocked crawler user agents list.)

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Thanks @JimPas will try that

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I didn’t find direct answer, but will that block totally, similar than I can do for example on Nginx and serve error 301, 444, what ever depending on user agent? Or shall it just use robots.txt?

I’m blocking on Nginx right now around 450 user agents. Handling that amount using settings of Discourse is just impossible (in the meaning I don’t know if I could import those using rails what-so-ever; quite academic for me, though, because I have Nginx front of Discourse).

Should this branch move to another topic?

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This post by @codinghorror, How to block all crawlers but Google’s, gives info on both blocking and allowing bots. This may be what you’re looking for.

Probably, but that linked topic above is from July, 2019. :slightly_smiling_face:

I know that topic and settings it is referring. In this topic is mentioned how to block login using robots.txt. But robots.txt doesn’t block much, because following, or even looking it, is a choice.

And I’m still confused because that one sentence:

Does not apply if allowlist is defined

If allowlist works totally opposite way and is allowing only whitelisted user agents and blocking everything else that would be so dangerous setting it should not be there at all.

There is really wide variety of user agent, and I’m quite sure Discourse can’t do things such way it can detect when an user is a human and when it is a bot, and after that decide when it uses whtelisting and when not.

That means too that if there is real blocking and someone decides use whitelisting that poor admin will close doors to everyone just because only googlebot is allowed. And trying whitelist every ”human” user-agents is… just impossible.

Every topic that I found tell how to use block-setting, not what it does. Big difference.

That is why I would like to see somekind codex here that digs in bit deeper that short helps. And sorry, GitHub is not the right answer. It is wonderful place if one would like to do dev-job. Otherwise and for admins… no.

So — I still don’t know what blocking and allowing means here.

And I’m totally sure this branch is not anymore how to find alternative to adsense :wink: But I don’t flag myself anymore just to ask moving to another topic — I’ve learned my lessons.

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I find this to be true in so many different areas - the “how to”, but not the “why or what it does.”

It is somewhat confusing using both an allow list and a block list. But I think the major difference is when using the allow list is that you’re actually blocking everything that’s not on your allow list. In using a block list is that you’re just blocking listed crawlers/bots… everything else is okay to get through. Now the confusing part - what happens when both lists are used. :confused:

Ah, so I’ll just mention @JammyDodger to move these posts to another or new topic. We did indeed drift a wee bit off-topic. :wink:

Exacly my point. Everything. Including users.

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Any current recommendations on the alternatives to AdSense supported by Adplugin? I see AdButler, Amazon, Carbon, and DFP.

My site is about food and restaurants, and AdSense doesn’t seem to be targeting that market at all.

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