By now, you've probably seen the ads on the right column on the front page and in the bottom of individual blog entry pages. A friend of mine works for Google and she was telling me about this AdSense program. You just sign up and show ads on your website and Google gives you some money back to you every time your visitors click on an ad. Now, what makes it unique, is that these are not just any random ads, but aware of the context, based on the content you have on your page. I immediately figured that it's a great idea and Google is probably making loads of money with it. For Google, it's just a brilliant way of leveraging their existing information and knowledge of the whole web. However, I never really thought much more about it.
Sometime ago, we were talking about blogging with this friend of mine. She didn't know I had this blog, and interested, she asked about how many hits I usually get and what's my Google Page Rank. I always turn it off on my Google Toolbar, so I didn't know. Anyway, I turned it on just to see what I get and saw that my front page was ranked 5 out of 10. I didn't really know what to think of it, but my friend said that "hey, that's surprisingly good - maybe YOU should join the AdSense program". I hesitated a bit - don't ads on a blog look kind of stupid? - but she told me about how they work. Naturally, I got interested in the context awareness part and wanted to see how well it would do on my pages. This is not a high traffic site, but I figured that if I can cover my costs for running it (about $45 / year so we are really not talking about big bucks here :) it's worth to try out.
I can imagine that these context-aware ads would work really well for example on sites where a hardware, camera etc. enthusiast would write reviews on products. I'm still not sure if they fit here. What do you think? Do you get annoyed when you see the ads? Curse the site and refuse to ever again read my blog? If I start getting comments like that, I'll just take them out, but I'll keep them for now in the spirit of science experiment. Currently, it seems that Google's algorithm has a hard time deciding what kind of ads it would show on my front page. I guess it's natural because of the varied, mixed content. However, on some of the individual entry pages the ads are valid and surprisingly relevant.