AdSense allows website owners to earn money from their sites in a way that they couldn’t do before. All they have to do is put the AdSense code in their pages, and some visitors to the site will click on the ads that are displayed. The more visitors a site gets, the more people will click on the ads, and the more money the site owner will make. Because the ads are contextual, they match the content of the pages they are displayed on, which suits the advertisers because it drives people who are interested in their topic to their sites, and they only pay when people click on their ads.
Everyone is happy. Google makes lots of money, advertisers get lots of targeted traffic and only pay for ad impressions when someone clicks on them, Web users can find more things that they are interested in, and website owners can make anything from a small amount of money to a very large amount of money. Even the earnings from tiny websites can often offset or pay for the upkeep of the sites – hosting, for instance. Google created a system where everyone is a winner, and if people hadn’t taken advantage of it in ways that weren’t intended, everyone would still be happy.
Here endeth the “Good” side of AdSense. Google’s creation is excellent, but in launching it, they inadvertantly created something of a monster that just keeps growing.
Some people soon realised that they could capitalise on AdSense in ways that would be detrimental to the Web, to Web users, and to search engines, including Google itself. A new off-white, and sometimes positively black, industry was born.
