Tom over at Silicon Valley Watcher makes the case that AdSense really isn’t a great way for most publishers to monetize their content. His post cites recent earnings reports that Google is sharing less, not more, revenue with publishers. The Fool is also running a detailed breakdown of Google’s traffic acquisition costs – which is a good proxy for the revenue they share with publishers.

It’s great to see the industry finally recognize that new monetization approaches are desperately needed.

Tom’s argument is a good one. Sprinkling AdSense all over your site or content might not yield the best results. We’ve seen this as well. Publishers who turn to us for an alternative monetization approach generate considerably more revenue by embedding relevant Matchpoint search forms into their content than they do by sprinkling AdSense.

A big part of the issue at work here is the price that Advertisers are willing to pay. AdSense is known to convert pretty poorly for most Advertisers due to the lack of behavioral targeting and qualification that users go through before clicking on the ads. This has led most advertisers to bid a lot less for clicks on AdSense ads – which means a lot less revenue to share with publishers.

Matchpoint search forms have the opposite effect.

Our Advertisers are willing to pay more (usually a lot more) for introductions to consumers. There are a few reasons for this:

• Profiling. Matchpoint users answer category specific questions on our search forms in order to find businesses that are a match for their needs. Advertisers in turn bid for the opportunity to present their business to those consumers that match their target customer profile. This “profile matching” ensures that the introductions we make are extremely qualified.
• Confirmation. After a user completes one of our search forms, they are asked to confirm their interest. We won’t make an introduction unless the user confirms via our confirmation e-mail. We do this to ensure that the consumer is truly interested in finding the right match.
• Offers & Proposals. Matchpoint allows businesses to go beyond advertising and actually submit custom offers or proposals to consumers. These offers and proposals can be very detailed and pushed to the consumer via our proxy e-mail system. Submitting a rich set of information for the consumer to consider during their selection process ultimately leads to higher conversion rates.

Our approach to creating strong economics for both publishers and advertisers is to essentially eliminate the economic waste that is typically found in CPC Adwords/AdSense style programs due to unqualified clicks.

So If you are looking for an alternative to AdSense give Matchpoint a try. We’re pretty sure you’ll like it.