There 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.
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.
Think about the situation of the first group, the vendor of a product or service. The logical thing to do is to build a website and try to capture visitors searching for a few search words (or “keywords”) relevant to the product. The problem here is that this only targets the people who are already looking for the product! And, unless the seller has done a really great job at getting the web site towards the top from the search rankings for the keyword, individuals might have to be looking for the exact product name to ever find the seller’s website! The website is hopelessly narrow in its scope but the seller does not have the time or money to produce more sites to capture a larger portion of the possible 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!
In addition to displaying their small ads on the Google search results page, the sellers can also choose to display them on the “Content Network”. By utilizing the content network, the little ads the seller has produced should appear on websites that have content material related to what their own ad will be about! Many sellers have figured out that this generates additional streams of visitors to their own websites. The content network allows sellers to attract web surfers who were not searching for or even thinking about their own product. Its like using a brightly colored box to attract the attention of shoppers walking down the aisles of a local grocery store. Once a seller taps into this huge additional stream of visitors, their sales expand dramatically!
This brings us to the second group, the Adsense publisher. These people are individual website owners who have realized that, by agreeing to display Google ads, they can generate additional income from clicks on those ads. The more popular their website is, the more clicks there will be. Some websites will generate a few dollars a month in Adsense revenue, while other more popular sites 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 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 all three of the groups involved benefit from the Adsense system: the Adwords buyer with a item or service to sell, the Adsense publisher who profits from sending visitors to the seller’s website and, maybe most of all, the web surfer whose time on the internet is more enjoyable and productive than ever. This system that some thought would never perform will only get larger in the future and that will be to the advantage of all of us!
Cole Ossiant specializes in websites on exercise, weight reduction and internet marketing, but his latest website www.giantmountainbikes.org evaluates and lists the best Giant Mountain Bikes.
categories: adsense,internet marketing
