Wednesday's Weird Web Thievery - The Evil Duck is out to get YOU!

This is just one of those weird random things that you see once in a while, and the relevance is just perfect!

The beauty of Google Adsense is that you can make money from the traffic on your website with little effort. You apply to be a part of the programme, get the code and insert it into your website. Simple as anything from a web developers perspective. The income is small if you have low traffic, that seems to grow exponentially with traffic growth.
The whole thing is based on clever algorithms and even cleverer little bot programs that crawl the internet in a state of perpetual hunger for information.
The ugly side of the Adsense Programme is that you have no control over what ads are served.

If you set it up right the hyper intelligent Google Spider-bots look at the content of your page and serve ads based on that content. A wonderful system - if you are talking about holidays in Nelson on your page, you might well be served an airline ad, or travel luggage, or even an ad for accommodation in Nelson.
It all goes horribly wrong here though - click on the image to see it larger.....

Imagine searching for more information about that condition, to then see the evil duck looking back at you Granted that the bird in the google ad is actually a goose, but let's not get too specific, and let the facts stand in the way of a good story!

Google Adsense - does it make you more money?

Short answer is yes it does. However it comes at a price. You risk sending your hard earned traffic away at the expense of a few cents.
Is it the best solution for gaining revenue on your website or blog? The jury is still out on that one.

We have installed the Adsense Program on most of our sites in conjunction with an internal advertising platform as well. That seems to give us a better mix of advertising revenue. For our clients websites that we have developed, and / or continue to manage, the conversation is a little more in depth. Adsense seems to work best on large traffic volume sites, but there are benefits to having it installed anyway.
If you are one of our clients, log in and head over to the client area, there are further articles about this conversation that need to be digested so that you have a better understanding of the pros and cons of installing such a system.

If you would like to be one of our clients feel free to send us an email outlining your project. We are always keen to take a look.