When they announced the creation of the Adsense system, there were many who thought Google was making a major mistake and that the system would never catch on, much less ever make any money. Yet today, Adsense generates more than One BILLION dollars in revenue for Google each year! By any measure, Adsense is one of the most successful and profitable systems on the web. The doubters ought to have realized that the folks at Google would never make such a massive investment in something unless they had thoroughly analyzed it and seen the large profit potential.
But Adsense isn’t a success because it is profitable for Google. Adsense is a success because it is profitable for all three of the types of participants who use the system. The first group of participants is the people who advertise via AdWords in the hope their sales will increase. Second are individual website owners who have realized that they can earn money by displaying ads on their websites. And, finally, the third group is the millions of people who spend time on the internet moving from website to website.
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.
Hardly any sellers have the resources to create websites to chase after more than a handful of research keywords. Fortunately, the Google Adwords program permits these sellers to produce a list of ALL the search keywords they would like to attract visitors for, make small, concise ads for them and then pay Google when someone clicks on one of these advertisements to come to their web site! The more popular the keyword is, the more it will cost the vendor for those clicks, however the seller can set a daily budget and change it at any time so they are in complete control. This enables the seller to greatly expand their marketing effectiveness on the internet and allows the them to literally “buy” visitors 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!
So who runs this “Content Network”? It is the second group, the Adsense publisher. These people are individual website owners who have realized that, by agreeing to display Google ads, they are able to generate extra income from clicks on those advertisements. The more traffic their website has, the more clicks there will be on the Adsense ads in it. Publishers have found that a few low traffic websites can each create a few dollars a month in Adsense revenue, while other much more popular sites can very easily create 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! But this motivation is the genius of the Adsense system! Instead of sellers having to work alone to increase their sales, they now have thousands of Adsense publishers looking for every way possible to create clicks to these sellers sites! There is no way these sellers, Google or any other single business entity could possibly duplicate the drive, creativity and imagination behind this effort to increase clicks!
The third group, the web surfer, is the beneficiary of all this activity. Sure, there was a time when web surfing could get pretty frustrating because many of the websites in the search results just contained a bunch of Adsense ads and nothing else! However Google has become very effective at weeding out these types of websites and, these days, a site has to have great, relevant info on what is being searched for to remain at the top from the search results for long. You can find still many websites designed to display Adsense advertisements, however the successful ones additionally provide good information to the visitor.
So the Adsense system truly does benefit all three from the groups involved: the Adwords buyer with a item or service to sell, the Adsense publisher who profits from sending visitors to the vendor and, possibly 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 just get larger in the future and that will be to the profit of all of us!
After specializing in websites on exercise, healthy eating and internet for over a year, Toby Riscoletti has invesigated a new topic and created www.croscillcurtains.org, a site that evaluates and lists the best Croscill’s Curtains.
