Inside AdSense

Google uses search activity from the past several hours to help match ads in adsense for content[1]. Hiding those from other ad networks is, imo, one of the best reasons they should be sued for antitrust. We've recently started to expand the use of the query words in referral URLs to a few hours so we can so we can continue to deliver more relevant ads. The technical way that we're doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user's browser. After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. [1] http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/02/better-contextual-matching.html

Can anyone explain why the original blogspot post ( http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/02/six-ways-to-experiment-with-adsens… ) links only to "invis.gif 1x1 pixels" ? I've been rechecking this url over past 12 hours with this same result. Is this a hacking of blogspot? or something that happens there when a blogspot blog goes bad. Actually I note that the home blog page (http://adsense.blogspot.com/) also goes only to that .gif - odd, since surely this is a Google-developed blog, isn't it?

Agreed. Google shared with us early last year that the revenue split on Adsense is 68% (http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html) - meaning you keep 68% of what they are paid to run the ad and they keep 32%. You can imagine some very respectable proportion of their income every year is the 1/3 coming from spam/scraped/etc. adsense placements. Another interesting article on HN just new is that Google's algorithms already seem to know what crap content is and what good content is: http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2011/01/google-probably-knows-wh… and my guess is that Google will only roll out improved search results when the cost to the company is great enough to justify the loss of income. It is a publicly traded company, I don't think Google can just cut out millions of dollars of revenue from their bottom line because they want to not be evil - the shareholders would probably ask for people's heads on platters. Of course only Google knows the extent of which their income-from-spam is, but I imagine it is significant otherwise they would have solved that problem already as the interest in Duck Duck GO, Blekko and Bing/Yahoo continues to rise/be-discussed-more (Don't know if the ACTUAL usage suggests that people are doing more than just talking or moving over to using different services full time) Google's compute power is other-worldly. This WP article doesn't do it justice:…

Google has historically not been very open about this, but they're very gradually becoming more transparent on ad pricing: their cut is 32% for ads on the content network, so the advertiser is getting charged $1.47 for every $1 you see in your stats. See: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html Their customer service is abyssmal. This is intentional. Everyone doing business with Google needs to go into that relationship with eyes wide open in that respect. reocities.com probably got banned because -- and this is a pretty important concept -- there is no incentive for their Indian quality rater to think "Hmm, although in five seconds that sure sounds like it is a typosquatting spam site which is infringing on the Geocities trademark and built on industrial strength copyright violation, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and investigate this thoroughly." Typically, AdSense pays much, much more poorly than individually negotiated advertising buys, which is why most major sites use it only for placing remnant inventory. (It isn't called "webmaster welfare" for nothing.) You also get the best results of it if your page is essentially an extension of someone's Google search, which is why eHow gets $2.50 CPMs from just one of the thirteen ads on their bingo-related pages: their traffic is overwhelmingly (60%) direct from Google for queries with demonstrable intent in commercial areas. (This is better than quadruple the performance of…

Yes adchoices symbols are used by Google Adsense ads. See this official post http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-in-ads-notice-label-and-icon.h…

Many of the bigger "JavaScript" projects aren't written in JavaScript. Browsers support any language. As long as they compile to JavaScript, that is. Also, Dart just works fine. Inside browsers as JavaScript and outside browsers in its own VM. This was written in Dart, for example: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2015/04/new-adsense-performance-reports.ht… You really don't have to use JS if you don't want to.

We don't think Google did something intentionally We worked a lot with them. They posted that on their Adsense blog 1 month before the blacklisting : http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/08/adsense-api-on-e-commerce-platform…

They also need to stop toying around with amateur designs at the expense of the whole AdSense programme: http://adsense.blogspot.se/2014/05/a-new-look-for-text-ads-on-google.h… I've seen the past works of the designers on the AdSense team and I'm not impressed. Plus it's quite naive to think that one design will fit all websites. Why can't AdSense, like other ad and affiliate networks, just open up an API so publishers themselves can be in charge of how their ads look and behave?

Emailed the contacts I made at the AdSense event, they said they'd look into it but never responded. Contacted my friends at Google who referred me to other AdSense employees, those contacts also ended up no longer responding to emails. Going through the usual appeal process just returned automated messages, which also ended up in a dead end. So eventually we just moved on. Funny enough, I was able to dig up an old blog post by the AdSense team with my photo: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/09/continuing-adsense-in-your-city-jo… There's me holding up a big chalkboard, two weeks before getting banned off their platform. That was years ago, so I've since moved on but it was a good lesson learned.

>you have to remember that Google is merely the middle man for every $1 they're paying out they would have to at least be making $5 - $10 more so they're always ahead. Google pays 68% to the publisher. http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html

They've said their revshare is 68% in the past: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html It would require significant changes to their bidding and reporting applications to fudge paying out less for advertiser dollars sourced from a voucher. So I suspect they eat the cost and the net effect is an aggregate boost in earnings.

Google do share the percentage of advertising revenue that they give to publishers: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html (It’s 68% for AdSense for content, and 51% for Adsense for search.)

According to this: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html it's 68%. Wow, I wasn't expecting google to pay out quite so much. At those percentages it actually becomes possible. Depending on how profitable the sites and Google are at serving the content and the ads (respectively) it could work.

The Adsense team have clarified this point themselves in a comment to the original article: "The 68% revenue share for AdSense for content applies to all online publishers, and is not an average revenue share. If you're showing AdSense for content ads on your pages, you're receiving 68% of the amount advertisers pay for those ads. While the revenue share can vary for some major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts, these amounts are not in any way averaged together. Also, there isn’t anything additional taken off the top. You get 68 percent, period." [http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html?showCom… My original skepticism was unfounded.

Official post by Google: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html

Here is a link about how search monetizes when compared to content sites (~ 30 to 1!) http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007053 As an extension of that, sites which get most of their traffic from search often have the highest ad CPM values because the ad targeting is so relevant on the AdSense ads. And this is true even moreso now that Google is also using the referrer for ad targeting http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/02/better-contextual-matching.html Scraper sites do quite well on the ad revenues front because most of the traffic is search driven, and because the content ends up so bad that the ads look all the more appealing.

Here is the story: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/08/getting-most-revenue-from-every.ht… Seems like direct competition with PubMatic.

It's pretty much universal with AdSense. If you know anyone who makes a significant amount of money, ask them about it. Or just browse the AdSense board on WebmasterWorld. I have personally increased revenue by over 100% by making small color and positioning changes, and this is also fairly common (I cited 20-30% because I wanted to be super-conservative in my claim). But here are some examples: From Google's official blog: Removing a border from an ad doubled revenue to $650/day: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/05/unobtrusive-ads-can-boost-revenue.… Palette swap doubled clickthrough: http://www.cyberindian.com/web-marketing/article.php?article_id=82 Webmasterworld thread: Most people did not disclose percentage, but some did (85% increase, 100% increase, etc).. http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/14556.htm There are endless examples.. just Google it.

Or if that's not your thing, even optimizing your Google Ads would go a long way. I'm certainly not an expert in this, but here are some tools & tips from people who are: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/04/meet-ivan-optimiser-but-please-no.… http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/03/22/google-adsense-facts-faqs-a… http://uphook.blogspot.com/2006/04/getting-most-out-of-adsense-top-10.… Google Ad Manager is also awesome: https://www.google.com/admanager/ Please report back to HN about what you did and how things worked out!

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/11/accidental-clicks-fade-into-backgr… A large % of the traffic to adsense was accidental clicking, a large amount of effort was expended on tricking users into accidently clicking on those links by making them look like they were same-site links. Of course that became a TOS violation. On a CPM basis I can see some value in having a brand associated with a flash game, or having websites sponsored by something. I think you're trying to build a faster horse. Sites that turn margins and backgrounds into advertising, which exist, are more likely to gain traction than another "pin the tail on the donkey" "click here to shoot the monkey" flash/js ad. Of course this would be far better addressed by someone from AdPinion.com as their entire business model appears to rely on giving people the ability to view more relevant ads.