When Google announced the creation of the AdSense system, there were a lot of people who did not believe the idea would catch on and there was no way it would ever generate significant profits. Yet today, Adsense is probably the most well known pay per click venture in the world and generating more than ONE BILLION dollars in revenue for Google each year! By any measure, Adsense is one of the most profitable systems on the internet. The doubters should have realized that the folks at Google would never make such a massive investment in something unless they had thoroughly analyzed it first and seen the huge 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!
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 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 cash! However this motivation is the real 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 create clicks to get potential buyers to their websites! It would be impossible for these sellers, Google or any other single organization to duplicate the drive, creativity and imagination behind this effort to increase clicks!
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 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!
Tracy Stackman has specialized in websites on internet marketing, fitness and weight loss, his latest website www.allcladsautepan.com evaluates and lists the best Saute All Clad.
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