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 from the first group, the people with a product or service to sell. The normal thing to do is to build a website and try to capture visitors that have searched for a handful of research words relevant to the product. The issue with this is that it only targets the individuals who are already searching for the seller’s item! And, unless they have done a very good job at getting their own web site to the top of the search rankings for that item type, people almost need to be looking for the product by its exact name to ever find the website! The seller’s web site is hopelessly narrow in its scope and the seller does not have the time or cash to create more sites to capture a bigger portion of the potential visitors.
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!
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 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 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, Micah Hrbek has departed from his normal topics and created www.baldwindeadbolts.com, a site that reviews and lists the best Deadbolts by Baldwin.