What Has Gone Wrong with
Wordpress Adsense Themes Industry?
The headline of the blog post sounds dramatic, but some of the trends that you will see shortly in this research will explain the reason of this tone. The demand on the market of adsense optimized wordpress themes is declining.
That does not mean that this market is dead: of course, not – people are crazy about making money with blogs. They get up and get back to bed with the idea of getting rich with their WP blog. They want to make money.
But, just have a look as the screenshot below where I am comparing ‘wordpress money’ and ‘adsense theme’ search trends…
Now let’s think together what this picture has opened to us.
We see that people definitely want to make money with wordpress – the search demand keeps rising all the time. We also see that for a long time (till Jan 2009) people have been more interested in adsense themes than in making money with wordpress. But in 2009 the trend has changed completely: people still want to make money with their blogs, but there are no longer enthusiastic about adsense themes.
My personal explanation for this – bad experience with lots of wp adsense optimized themes. If you have any other ideas, it will be interesting to hear them in the comments to this blog post, because your personal feedback would be very interesting.
I Could Not Believe that
AdSense Themes are a “Dead End”!
That news was close to a shock. Is it the end of making money with adsense on blogs? Are people ready to give up on the very idea of making good profits with good adsense theme?
Driven only by intuition I decided to see what is going on with the best adsense themes on the market.
That is why I simply typed into Google search ‘adsense theme’ and picked the first one that ranked high. That was a HeatMap theme. It was interesting to see what is going on with this theme and its search demand. Have a look at this screenshot…
The search demand is growing starting from Aug 2009. Since its launch the demand was jumping several times, every time getting higher and higher. And in Jan 2010 it went super high (most likely due to some good promo). After than the search demand got lower, but even now it is much higher than before the jump.
Now Comes a Question:
HOW Can Search Demand Increase
Inside the Niche that is Declining?
No, really, how can it be like this? The whole niche of adsense optimized themes is in bad times, and HeatMap theme (which is an adsense optimized theme) is on the stable rise.
The only logical answer I could find is that there must be something in this particular adsense theme that breaks the negative trend and turns into into a rising demand. Most likely, people simply got burned too much on other themes, and they found something in HeatMap theme that changed their mind about the whole industry.
WHAT Did They Find in HeatMap Theme?
Can this *Something* which They’ve Found
SAVE the Whole Industry?
So, I decided to “de-assemble” HeatMap theme into the elements and check if these elements of the theme are representing the rising trends.
In practice it was simple: I took the list of features that HeatMap is boasting about on their web site and decided to check what features are on the rising trend today.
(1) Ad Widgets – People Want Them
One of the first features that grabbed the attention was a new level of working with widgets. I am coming to Google and this is what I see…
Ok, people want widgets. Even more, they want ad widgets for wordpress – just have a look on the lovely rising trend for ‘wordpress ads widget’ and ‘wordpress ad widget’…
The market wants more freedom with ad widgets, because they feel kind of “limited/restricted” with what they have right now in the themes. So, HeatMap developers jumped onto the right track – an increasing demand for more freedom with ad widgets for wordpress themes.
(2) Adsense Theme Must be SEO Optimized
The strategy is the same: I am checking what HeatMap has in the list of features and see that they position their theme as the one that can help to “get the maximum Google love that your blog deserves.”
Checking the search demand for it – WOW, another score! This trend is also rising. Proofs below.
So, people want themes to be packed with SEO. Despite the fact that WP blog is already SEO friendly by default, the market wants to be 300% sure that SEO is included into the package.
Adding up a feature that boosts blog SEO into the ad theme is a smart marketing move.
Moving further on…
(3) Blog Page Templates – the More, the Better
Another feature that attracted my attention was about WP page templates, I assumed that people should love the chance to get “page templates for blog page, gallery, full width page, sitemap template, google search results template plus other useful templates.”
Indeed, the search demand for wordpress page templates is a good rising trend.
You See – They Want FREEDOM in Themes
I simply did not want to go on all features that are inside HeatMap theme and that can be used to maximize the effect of ads on the blog. But I found well over 10 features that are actually representing powerful rising trends.
We are coming to a very important conclusion – market of wordpress themes has reached the stage when people want maximum flexibility inside their themes.
I gave you just 3 examples: ad widgets, seo optimization, page template diversification. But I easily could go on with other features that I tool from HeatMap like: blog background customization (rising trend), social networks and wordpress (rising trend), wordpress navigation menu (also rising trend) – HeatMap has covered nearly all rising trends with their features 
The decline of demand for adsense themes has nothing to do with the end of the “wordpress money making mania” – people still want to make money on blogs. But people are tired of low quality themes that are putting ad units in an ugly and unprofessional way. And, on the contrary, the themes which give maximum freedom without boring programming knowledge will have success and will be a rising hit in sales.
Everyone who wants to make money with adsnese or who is working on a theme what will help people to make money with adsense, please pay attention to this big market trend. Otherwise you will slide down with the rest of the theme creators.
