I am in the beginning part of adding advertising to a website I handle, previously I only had sponsors appear but figure we can make more money by opening it up to Google absence. My question is this, has anyone done the math to figure out if they make more or less money by turning over all advertising to Google.

I have two options, add adsense and add an ad rotator for site sponsors, I would collect the money from the sponsors separate. This could probably generate a little more money from the sponsor initially, however they would demand preferential ad placement, possibly hurting our adsense account.

My other option would be to tell the sponsors to open up an AdWords account and advertise on our site. This would be more fair everyone involved because cost would be live competition. And I feel it might even make more money for us in the long run because other Google AdWords advertisers would have to pay more due to the competition.

I know we would be loosing some money to Google but feel that it may be worth it until this site is a bit larger.

A bit of info, the website is for the a US sailing class that has been gaining popularity, and is structured for a large off line ad campaign that will focus on getting people to the website. Last week we got 2,755 Visits, 11,706 Pageviews, avg. 4.25 P/V. Also we consistently see the following from week to week; high double digit growth (80-90%) in direct visits, low triple digit growth (100-250%) in organic traffic, and mid triple digit growth (400-600%) in referrals.

So where have you found success?

You will always tend to make less money with adsense rather than having your own sponsor network provided you have couple of sponsors always on. Else its better to be trusting the adsense.