Blogging Google AdSense
Google Adsense is the Google advertising technology that people place on their websites in exchange for money. I’ve seen it being used in a lot of places, and so I’ve decided to do a little bit more research into how it works, how easy it is to use, what kind of results it produces, etc. Now unfortunately, this may actually mean putting ads on this site for a little to play around with them. I’ve done the calculations, though, and the expected monetary compensation for a site of this size is ridiculously low. So trust me when I say I’m not in it for the money, and when the novelty of actually getting ads working is outweighed by the annoyance of actually having ads, I’ll take them down again.
I started by registered for Google AdSense last night. Apparently you need to go through an approval process; maybe they just want to make sure you’re not running a porn site? I submitted the application and they said it’d take one to two business days for it to be looked at, but I ended up getting an approval email about an hour later. That’s quite a fast turn-around. I haven’t yet looked at any of the stuff they want me to do, however, but as soon as I start playing with it, I’ll be writing some blog entries about how it’s going, what I had to do to get it working, etc. I’ve asked around with some of my online friends and they’re very eager to hear how this goes, as they’ve been curious about Google AdSense themselves, but never played with it personally. So I guess they’ll be experimenting with it through me by proxy.
February 2nd, 2007 at 17:37
I’m sure that you’ll like it. Of course traffic is very important for higher adsense income, but it’s always fun to see that somebody actually clicked on a Firefox+Google Toolbar referral link and helped you make a buck per download. Also it very much depends on the main topic of your pages and site: which keywords you use and how highly rated these keywords are by advertisers. Not to forget Google’s new smartpricing thing, where they calculate your share of a click by tracking whether or not the “clicker” actually bought something on the advertisers page… and so on. It’s no rocket science, but it’s also as impossible to predict as the weather which makes it exciting. Have fun with it and good luck ;)
February 3rd, 2007 at 14:45
Well, hopefully it will be fun to experiment with, though I’m not so optimistic that I will ever make any money out of it. $100 is a lot of ad views to accumulate for a small site such as this one. I’ll probably just end up taking down the ads after I get bored of playing with them.