So the Google AdSense thing wasn’t working for me, and I’m not referring to the fact that I only made 60 cents. OK, so maybe it has a little to do with that, but the real reason is that the ads were totally out of context. 99% of the ads that were displayed were about “blog”. The other 1% was about tsunami relief.
Both, I’m sure, are fine topics, but are not relevant to my content like they “were supposed to be”. I e-mailed Google about this a few times to find out what could be done. My third e-mail got no response at all. The two responses before that were (paraphrased):
- I need to wait for indexing by the AdSense crawler.
- I need to use full sentences and paragraphs about specific topics.
OK, the first one I could understand. I didn’t realize at first that AdSense uses a different index than the regular Google index.
The second suggestion, though, was a little frustrating, for a couple reasons. First, I know I’m not a hardcore tech writer, where all I write about is code, but the majority of my posts were, in some way, about technology and development. Second, I’m not writing term papers or essays, and in most cases, long paragraphs don’t “make sense”. Also, as far as I can tell, I nearly always use compelte sentences.
In addition to describing my above reasoning, in each of my three e-mails, I asked (or suggested) if there was a way to “tag” my content. For example, I could surround my content with something like this:
<div rel=”adsensecontent”>…</div>
Well, my third e-mail has been unanswered for 10 days now, so today I decided to ditch Google AdSense. It’s not that I expect them to change their technology based on my suggestion, but I suggested/asked about something like that in each of the three e-mails, and that part was ignored each time. It wasn’t working for me, maybe it will for you. I’m not the only one, though. Julie Lerman blogged about a similar issue.
Anyway, in place of AdSense, I’ve decided to post jobs from karmaONE, a service for referring people to open positions. You can read all about it here on their site. The service is currently in BETA, and, as you can see, most of the jobs are currently located in the San Francisco area. If you are a recruiter in the Wisconsin area, check out karmaONE — you can help to make this list more relevant. I might end up getting some money, but you’ll end up with a good candidate.
In the end, though, as much as I’d like extra money for doing pratcially nothing, I decided that I’d rather my “practically nothing” at least possibly help someone find a job. While making money would be nice, the satisfaction of potentially helping someone land a job outweighs the financial gain for me, even though there are other ways I could make money, like working with the Best Futures Brokers UK.
For those that care, I’m actually using OpenGUI’s Feed2JS service to display these links. What can I say — I’m too lazy to write my own RSS display module for CommunityServer.