OzWebMasters

I’m only guessing the improvement. Up until this week, I have read emails and then clicked on the delete button at the bottom of the page. That button has now disappeared, forcing me to scroll back to the top to delete the email.

Unexpectedly, I am finding myself noticing the banner ads at the top of the page, like never before. Whoever thought of this at Microsoft deserves a promotion!

Google Adsense recently had a survey asking what publishers would like changed/improved, and one of the things I ticked was “be paid by PayPal”. Yahoo Publisher Network have now taken the lead in this regard, offering it as a payment option. This alone has me keen to try YPN

There have been blog posts discussing the huge amount of revenue that Wikipedia is missing out on by non running ads ($10s of Millions I presume), and what they could use such cash for (give it to charity?)

I reckon:

1) If you start out saying “there will never ever be any ads”, you need to stick to that, because that is the basis on which people helped the service

2) Google did it before with Google Directory (a copy of DMOZ with ads attached), and could quite easily do it with Wikipedia and out-rank Wikipedia in search queries

3) It is extremely important to consider immense success when creating your website - because it just might happen. Freecycle is having similar problems right now - a massive user-base but a vow to always be non-profit. This leaves you vulnerable to big business, without the funds to fight back.

Google is using this as a case study, to show how this site now gains 10% of their revenue from AdSense. Typical of a Google release, the manager of the site says:

“we quickly found AdSense a very effective way to gain additional revenue that we channelled into our advertising budget in order to build our brand.”

Yep, the best place to spend your AdSense revenue is obviously at AdWords