Subscribe RSS FeedThere were lots of doubters when Google announced the creation of the AdSense program, people who said it would be a failure and could never generate any significant revenue. Today none of those doubters can be found anywhere as Adsense now generates more than One BILLION dollars for Google every twelve months! Adsense, no matter how you look at it, is one of the most successful ventures on or off the internet. Those doubters should have realized that Google must have analyzed every detail of how Adsense would work before they would make the kind of massive investment needed to create the system in the first place.
Yet the success of Adsense is not because it makes money for Google, its because it is a productive system for all three of the groups of people who use the program. One group is the person who has a product or service to sell and uses the system to increase their sales. The second group is made up of individual web site owners who have realized that they can earn cash by displaying the seller’s ads on their own sites. And, finally, the third group is the millions of people who “surf the web”.
Consider the situation of the first group, the seller of a product or service. The normal thing to do is to build a website and try to capture some of the search traffic for a few search words relevant to the product. The problem with this is that it only targets the people who are already looking for the seller’s product! And, unless they have done a very good job at getting their website to the top of the search rankings for the product type, people almost have to be searching for the product using the seller’s company name to ever find the website! The seller’s website is hopelessly narrow in its scope and the seller does not have the time or money to create more websites to capture a larger portion of the potential traffic.
Very few sellers have the resources to create websites to capture more than a handful of search keywords. Googles Adwords system allows these sellers to create a list of ALL the search keywords they would like to attract traffic for, make small, concise ads for them and then pay Google only when someone actually clicks on one of these ads to come to their website! The more popular the keyword is, the more it will cost the seller for those clicks, but the seller can set a daily budget and change it at any time. This is a huge expansion of the seller’s marketing effectiveness on the internet and allows the Adwords buyer to literally “buy” traffic to their website!
The seller in addition can select whether to display their advertisements only within the Google search outcomes page, or additionally on something called the “Content Network”. By using the content network, the seller’s small ads appear on websites that have content related to what the seller’s keywords! Most sellers have figured out that this generates additional streams of visitors to their sites. Using the content network lets sellers attract web surfers who were not specifically looking for or even thinking about their product. You could think of it like using a brightly colored box to attract the attention of shoppers walking down the aisles of the local grocery store. Once a seller taps into this large additional flow of visitors, their sales expand dramatically!
This brings us to the second team, the Adsense publishers who really make up the Content Network. These people are individual web site owners who’ve realized that, by agreeing to display Google advertisements, they are able to create additional income from clicks on those advertisements. The more web traffic their site has, the more clicks there should be. Adsense publishers have found that a few low traffic sites can create a few dollars a month in Adsense revenue, while other more popular websites can easily generate hundreds of dollars a month.
It did not take people long to figure out that they could specialize in the creation of these Adsense websites and potentially make a lot of money! Yet this motivation to create websites to serve Google ads is the genius of the Adsense system! Instead of sellers having to work alone to increase their own sales, they now have thousands of Adsense publishers searching for every way possible to produce clicks to these sellers websites! There is no way these sellers, Google or any other single organization entity could possibly duplicate the drive, creativity and imagination behind this effort to increase clicks and connect the potential buyer with the seller!
The third group, the web surfer, is more and more the beneficiary of all this activity. There was a time when web surfing could be frustrating because many of the sites in the search results just contained a bunch of Adsense ads and nothing else. But Google has become very effective at weeding out these sites and, today, a site has to have good, relevant information on what is being searched for to remain at the top of the search results for a given keyword. There are still many sites built to display Adsense ads, but the successful ones also provide good information to the visitor.
So the Adsense system really does benefit all three of the groups involved: the Adwords buyer with a product or service to sell, the Adsense publisher who profits from sending traffic to the seller and, perhaps most of all, the web surfer whose time on the internet is more enjoyable and educational than ever before. This system that many thought would never work will only get larger in the future and that will be to the benefit of all of us!
After specializing in websites on weight control, fitness and internet marketing for over a year, Jason Canpolo has departed from his normal topics and created www.eileenfisherpants.com, a site that reviews and lists the best Pants by Eileen Fisher.
