Why do people expect it to work? Because that’s just the meme that’s been created over the past few years… that Adsense “just works” for everyone. That is finally starting to change in blogger’s minds I think.

But, as Jim points out in his comment a lot of bloggers aren’t doing any optimization to try and get better results. Is that Adsense’s fault? Why do people expect it to work “brilliantly” out of the box?

It doesn’t work “outta the box” for low-traffic bloggers without optimization, you know, the 54 million (or more) out of 55 million that Technoratio tracks?

That’s not a generalization to say that the VAST majority of bloggers will act the same way that Kawasaki did, which was to simply throw an Adsense ad on their site and expect riches because everyone’s been telling them Adsense works that way.

Remember, just like Guy, most bloggers don’t care about making money, they started their blog to write or for fun. So why would they go out of their way to learn how to optimize an ad? They don’t.

Seconldy, you are correct about what the expectation or intention of the blogger is. So let’s make it simple. Let’s assume that the blogger isn’t primarily trying to generate revenue (that is to say, they are focused on creating a good quality blog and are hoping to make a little money as a side effect). Let’s, then, define sucking as getting less than $5 per month. Ok – you have the data. So with these parameters, how many bloggers does AdSense suck for?