Google AdSense

I was searching for Barnes & Noble in downtown this afternoon, when I noticed that there was an Amazon.com sponsored link on the page. hmm… interesting. I first thought that Amazon.com might add “Barnes & Noble” as a keyword for its website on that search engine. So, I entered “Barnes & Noble” in the search box in Yahoo, Google, and Clusty. Looking at the search result, I found Amazon.com sponsored link on Google (in the Sponsored Links panel on the right of the page, but not in the Sponsored Links panel on the top of the page). I didn’t see Amazon.com link on Yahoo and Clusty. To make sure that Amazon.com does have its sponsored link on yahoo and Clusty, I enter “book” on those two search engine. And yes, Amazon.com does have its sponsored link on those websites. I thought that if Amazon.com added “Barnes & Noble” as its keyword on Google, why it doesn’t do that also on other search engine. The answer is that Amazon.com didn’t add “Barnes & Noble” as its keyword. I think that what I’ve seen is what Google AdSense can do better than others. The Amazon.com’s sponsored link I saw on Google result page didn’t show up because of the word “Barnes & Noble”. As you might know, AdSense didn’t show sponsored links base only on the keyword search, but also on the result from the keyword search. For example, in this case, the first link of the search result is definitely www.barnesandnoble.com and its description is “BarnesandNoble.com - The World's Largest Bookseller Online.” Amazon.com’s sponsored link might have associated with the keyword “bookseller” or “online”. That’s why Amazon.com’s sponsored link shown up on the Google search result. This is what Google AdSense can provide better than those traditional sponsored link based on keyword search. In this case, someone who’s never heard about Amazon.com.com and probably looking for Barnes & Noble store could see ad says “Amazon.com.com has low prices on millions of new & used books. Find the book you want with search inside the book. Save with free super saver shipping on qualified orders over $25.” This could lead to a new customer for Amazon.com. This case shows that AdSense allows companies to show their ads to their competitor’s customers. Additionally, a company could also show different ad to different users. Ads that can catch particular users’ interest will get more chance to be clicked. It would be great if a company could show the ads that match viewers’ interest. For example, company might show the ads that express its competitive advantage over its competitor if the viewer is viewing a page that contain its competitor name. Whereas, it might show ads express its promotions to the viewers who are viewing the content shown that they’re price-concern consumers.

There are many interesting issues about this model. I googled “AdSense” and found many websites selling a book or a link to an information on how to make money with AdSense. Some website also sells a list of the “top paying” keywords. To someone who might not know what AdSense is, it’s an affiliate program that allows anyone to display ads on the website and earn money based on cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-1000-impressions (CPM). It pays different amount of money for each sponsored link depended on how much the sponsor pay for the ads. They also employ auction system and let sponsors name their own price for displaying their ads. If you pay more, your ads will show up on the top of the sponsored links. That’s why there are websites selling top paying keywords. If you put those keywords on your website, the top paying sponsored link will show up. And when your visitors see or click on those links, you will gain more money. As there are websites selling top paying keywords, people might put those keywords on their websites hoping that the top paying sponsored links will show up on their page although those keywords don’t actually relate to their website. Thus, people who visit those websites might not be a target group of those sponsored links. This will reduce the benefit of the AdSense which try to show the ads to the target users who are interested in the content related to the ads.

What if someone setup a website with sponsored links on the page and developed a program to load that page from different computers (this could be a virus that distribute itself to others computers and request for the page containing sponsored links), so that the system recognized those request as different users. What if someone asked people to open the webpage and click on the link to boost up the revenue gained from AdSense program and shared that revenue with those people (this could become MLM-like model: you could gain money by loading webpage and clicking on the sponsored links. You might also invite your friends to do so, so that when your friends clicked on the sponsored links you would also gain some money). These ideas are illegal. I’m not suggesting or inviting you to implement those ideas. But it’s interesting to think of this issue from different point of view (users, webmaster, Google, companies who post ads on Google). Those issues might affect a company when considering bidding for ads posting in Google’s AdWord program. Google must have some ways to prevent people from cheating its system.