Infolinks VS. Adsense: Why I Removed Infolinks

Infolinks is an in-text advertising program. In-text ads appear within the text instead of being displayed in ad blocks like Adsense. After activating the Infolinks advertising program on your blog, double underlined words randomly appear throughout your blog posts. When a visitor mouses over the double underlined Infolink, a bubble ad appears and you earn some money if the ad inside is clicked by the visitor.

I read some good reviews about Infolinks and decided to put the ads in my blog to see what would happen. I ran Infolinks ads for less than one month before removing them for a few reasons.

Decrease In Adsense Earnings

I noticed a drop in my daily Adsense earnings soon after activating Infolinks. I waited a couple days, but decreased Adsense earnings continued until I took down the ads. After removing Infolinks from my blog there was literally an instant increase in Adsense earnings within one hour of removing the ads.

I figured a decrease in Adsense income could happen, since I only use one Adsense ad block, but I decided to test it anyway since there are other people who claim not to have any Adsense earnings decrease when using Infolinks.

Annoying Pop-Up Ads

I didn’t even realize there was an ugly Infolinks pop-up ad appearing when entering my blog. I didn’t see this till a few days after activating the ads.

I already use a pop-up Lightbox form for my newsletter, so the additional ad was probably irritating everyone coming to my blog. Not only was the pop-up annoying, but the links inside the pop-up probably drove visitors away from my site.

Too Many Links

Combining too many Infolinks with Adsense ads looks terrible, however, you can in fact reduce the amount of Infolinks appearing on your site if you want. I had about 12 links showing up and it looked like crap.

It’s bad enough that Adsense ads lure people away from your content, but the double dose of advertising links is overkill. I also noticed a decrease in my newsletter subscribers while running in-text advertising. This is also because the words inside my subscriber box were being double underlined with Infolinks.

Poor Earnings

Infolinks earnings were pretty low for me, at least in the short amount of time I ran the ads, which was under 1 month. Although I’m sure it’s possible that Infolinks could make more money than Adsense, you are probably better off sticking with Adsense. If you wanted to test the waters, it would probably be best to do one or the other, not both at the same time.

Infolinks VS. Adsense

I still made more money every day with Adsense, even after the decrease in my Adsense earnings that was caused by adding Infolinks to my blog posts. I think mostly it’s because everyone is familiar with Google and people probably feel more comfortable clicking on their ads.

I’m sure Infolinks could work in some blogs and I wouldn’t mind trying it again some time, but not in this blog.

Please leave a comment and share your experience with Infolinks.