Does Anyone Still Make Money Online With Google?

Google is everywhere, and everyone’s using it, but is there really a way to make money online with Google? This digital giant is the largest search engine and used by most people around the globe, so it stands to reason it should create some opportunities of its own! Here are some of the ways to make money online with Google...

How can you make money with Google?

Want Google as your main source of income? Realistically, there are only three ways to earn money online with Google, but all of them come with a big problem – you’ll need huge amounts of traffic on your website to actually get some money from it.

Display Advertising

These are the ads that are displayed on a web page and were a popular way to make money online with Google. There are lots of ways to incorporate them into a web page; there’s even a whole guide from Google on the best banner ad sizes and how each of them performs.

The downside? It’s basically a waste of time since ad-blocking software was rolled out and more and more people are opting out of ads altogether. There are ad-blocking software services that will whitelist your site and ads if you pay a fee, but people have caught on to this and switched to ad-blockers that don’t have this loophole.

YouTube Ads

Ever since it has been possible to allow ads on your YouTube videos, many creators choose this route to make money online with Google. Unfortunately, YouTube is notorious about monetising videos, and it can be almost impossible to earn money online this way.

You would need a huge audience and viral content for this, and even then, you can’t rely on just one or a few videos. You will need a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time over the last 365 days before you’re even allowed to monetise your channel.

Search Result Ads

These ads are specifically aimed at custom search on your site and it’s this type of search you can embed directly onto your site to help visitors find what they are looking for. Since it’s based on Google’s search algorithms, the results will be highly relevant, and you can monetise these search results. Still, without 100,000 visitors per month, you’re unlikely to make any decent amount of money.

Overall, if you have great traffic and website visitors, then you can earn money online with Google, but without viral content or raging popularity, it’s not worth the hassle with ads. To put it in perspective: you will only earn around €100 per month from the display and search advertising combined for 10k unique visitors each month.

There are much cleverer and easier ways to earn money online than with Google.

An alternative way to earn money with Google

Instead of frantically trying to make money online with Google from ads, you can pick another route. It’s technically still earning money "with Google.” Instead of ads, you should offer digital marketing services to others. Freelancers working as digital marketing experts can easily earn $50-150/hour for managing advertising campaigns using Google's products like AdSense.

Want to know more about digital marketing? Read more about becoming a digital marketing expert or checkout the top 10 ways to make money online.