Google Adsense Tips, Tricks n Latest Gossip Part 1

February 28th, 2007

Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend a conference here in Brisbane, Australia that was typically well attended by Googlers ready to give great tips and advice.

After the conference I managed to steal a few moments with a Googler from the US by the name of Michael Gutner and ask him a few questions. His answers were revealing and informative, and I thought I’d give you the inside track.

The advent of ‘Pay per Blog Sites’ is upon us – basically, under this revenue sharing model, website owners offer space on their blog for other contributors to write unique content, and pay a proportion of advertising income from that author’s content as a form of comission.

Some people are concerned this will create alot more ‘made for adsense blogs’ – blogs written purely to make money from adsense, rather than provide information to people. I personally think it will have a really great effect – At the end of the day, sites get popular because people are interested in the quality of the content – if no-one visits a site, no one clicks on the ads – simple.

I have other views – I reckon it’s a great isea because it will be a great enabler for those people with great ideas and insights to showcase them to a much wider audience, and get reimbursed, without the overhead of running their own site.

One of the problems of such revenue sharing schemes is the mechanics of splitting the revenue – basically there are two ways to do it –

1. Use google channels to measure income from the contributors page and write them a check or money transfer on a monthly basis for their proportion.
2. ‘Swap Out’ your Google adsense ID with your contributor’s id on their page part of the time (ie, if their commission is to be 80%, show ads using their adsense ID 80% of the time, and yours 20% of the time)

The first is probably the fairest, but also has a high administration cost for the website owner – making it probably only feasible for large, commercial blogs with heaps of traffic.

The second approach has less administration effort, but a few other negatives. Firstly, it takes a fair bit of coding to implement, and is imperfect as it relies on chance – you can never be absolutely certain that revenue is being evenly shared.

A potential problem with both approaches is that neither allows the author to be ‘absolutely sure’ that they are being paid their fair share of revenue.

I mentioned this conundrum to Michael, and said that I thought this presents a great business case for google. Why? –

1. Google has the economies of scale to handle payments, and is considered a ‘trustworthy brand’ – this would be relatively easy for them to implement, and would be seen as a godsend by most webmasters… and..
2. By encouraging ‘everyday people’ to join the blogging revolution and become adsense publishers, google both increases their brand awareness, and (here’s the cynic in me) the potential return on holding millions upon millions of small publisher’s income in escrow until the required minimum $100 for their adsense balance to be transferred to their chosen bank account is enormous.

Indeed, if I were Google, I’d have to have rocks in my head if I didn’t consider this idea as a top priority..

But it seems, as often happens with Google, they already thought of it 🙂

Michael gave me the scoop that in fact, Google is developing this functionality and it will become available in the near future as an addition to their existing adsense product range. As Michael said, Google has many, many new projects on-line at any given time, but he did say that he is certain that this feature is one that is in active development as we speak.

Anyway, that’s my small but signficant little tid-bit for tonight – But the fun will continue tomorrow – I have some more great tips from the conference which I’ll be writing about.. one particularly interesting one was how to ‘train’ google to serve ads that are more likely to get clicked.. it’s a good one.. 🙂 see the second part of my article here.

See you!

TheDuck

Entry Filed under: Google Adsense Tips