the timboucher experience

So, it seems Google has finally caved in on the whole AdSense thing. There was a big announcement on Blogger about how they would now be offering you a chance to use AdSense on your blog.

AdSense is one half of Google’s massively successful campaign to sell text ads online. The other half is AdWords. For the uninitiated, the way it works is that companies who want to draw traffic to their site will place bids on certain keywords, using the AdWords system. Around these keywords, they will design those little text ads you see pop up, most notably on the right-hand side of your Google search results, or your Gmail conversations.

AdSense is the other side of the coin. It’s for people with content-heavy websites, who want to cash in on some of this money being pumped into AdWords. By placing some code onto your site, you basically license some space to display these text ads. Your site content is scanned, and you receive ads which are theoretically related to the topic(s) of your content. And anytime anybody clicks on one of the AdSense ads on your site, you’re supposed to theoretically get a payment of possibly a few cents. Which adds up, if you get a lot of traffic, I suppose.

While some people bitch and moan about this sort of thing, I’m all for it. Even if I only make a few bucks over the course of a year, it’s still something. I don’t find their text ads to be terribly obtrusive, and they so seem to be generally fairly well targeted. And I could make some kind of excuse about how they provide some kind of weird cultural context for the things I’m talking about on my blog. But whatever.

It’s also cool, because up until a couple days ago, “personal sites” were not allowed into the AdSense system. I had submitted my site for inclusion several months ago, only to be declined on that grounds. But it seems they have come to their senses and realized that blogs are a huge market and gigantic source of online traffic, and so everybody wins by including them within their system.

However, I do think they are going to run into a lot of trouble with the way they chose to implement the whole thing. Problems arise immediately, since they had to include this warning in their initial announcement:

Things Not To Do
- Don’t come up with sneaky ways to click on your own ads or get your friends to help you. This is considered fraud.

- Don’t draw unnecessary attention to your ads. Even posting text that says “please click on these ads” is against the policy.

- Don’t share how much you’ve earned. That’s going to be hard for lots of bloggers but it is against the terms and conditions and will get you kicked out.

- Don’t fiddle around with the AdSense code. You’ve got to leave it the way it is if you want to get paid.

The other obvious problem to me - as an interface designer & a longtime Blogger user - is the transition between the Blogger system and the AdSense system. It’s probably going to be initially super-confusing for your average Blogger-er to figure out how to successfully mesh the two together. If I were them, I would have tied them together a little more smoothly. I suppose they didn’t do that though, because that would have meant modifying their systems. Whatever. I’ll stop blabbering about that now. I’m just happy I’m not the one who’s going to be having to answer all the confused customer support emails that are going to be resulting from this, and from their confusing tutorial, “How do I put AdSense on my blog?” I’m certainly no slouch when it comes to using the internet, and coding and whatnot, and it took me a good while to figure the whole thing out.

Also, here’s a good article about Google trying to police the AdSense program to protect against fraudulent use.

While you’re at it, you may as well download Google’s AdSense Preview Tool. While I’ve had some problems with it, when it’s working it’s really helpful for this stuff. You can use it to preview ads which appear on your page, without Google trying to nail you for fraudulent clicks.

• Blog text ads
• Kontera + AdSense
• AdSense ad targeting very poor
• Money money money money
• Site-Flavored Search :: Web Realms