Google^® Adsense™

Google Adsense: As the name aptly implies, "Adsense" makes on-line advertising a viable solution in promoting goods and services to a broad variety of advertisers and publishers. There have been several advertising and publishing programs that are catering to smaller segments of advertisers and publishers. Most of these programs never achieved sufficient level of trust from Internet community due to various reasons including the following:

• The advertisements consist of flashy banners, un-edited content. 

• Pop-ups annoying the users surfing the web site. 

• Unable to provide context sensitive advertisements 

• Spam associated with many of these advertisements.

Advertisers had difficulty in getting the appropriate CTR (Click Through Ratio) to justify ROI (Return On Investment). Only very few advertising companies such as Overture, Espotting, FindWhat, etc. have succeeded in getting advertiser confidence. However, these advertising companies have been using only small amount of available advertising space on the Internet. A global, yet reliable solution for advertising on billions of pages being viewed by Internet users every month is still to come.

Google Adsense addresses several of the above issues: 
1. Textual matter: Advertisements served by Google consist of only textual matter. Pictures and flashy banners are not accepted by Google Adwords (Adwords is the term given by Google to the ads published, note the term "words"). This has taken away the major irritant for the Internet user community. 
2. Context sensitive: The advertisements served are context sensitive. An website user is more inclined towards reading and visiting a site given in such an ad. As a result, publishers get better CTR, and the advertisers get better ROI. 
3. Broad-based: It is relatively easy for any web site that specializes in any product or service area to get accepted by Google Adsense program. One can apply for Adsense by going to www.google.com/adsense. This has made even the small publishers to be part of a global, yet reliable advertising process. 
4. It is relatively easy for advertisers to advertise on Google Adwords. There is no minimum payment required, nor any initial deposit. You will only pay for the number of clicks. One can apply for Adwords by going to www.google.com/adwords.

Still evolving:

Adsense is still in the process of evolution. As of this writing, it is not possible for publishers to register with Adsense that do not have English language as the medium. In other words, only English language web sites are accepted into the Adsense program. There is no clear way of determining whether a web site is eligible for participating in Adsense. Several publishers reported that their web sites were rejected by Adsense for no specific reason.

Several others may emulate the Google Adsense, and we can expect similar programs in the future from other reputed advertising companies.

- By Vijay.