Google Adwords Launches the AdSense Revolution

Enter Google AdWords. AdWords are those little ads you see on the right
hand side of the search results when you do a search at Google.com.
Advertisers pay to have their ads shown when people search for the
keywords they want to target. So, for example, if somebody is selling
synthetic engine oil, they would tell Google to show their ad when somebody
searched for “engine oil” or “synthetic engine oil” or other similar keywords.
And they choose how much they are willing to pay every time somebody
clicks on their ad.
AdWords literally exploded a vendor’s ability to sell their products online,
and it quickly grew into a huge money maker for Google. Google wanted to
find more ways to earn money from these advertisers, and they came up
with a brilliant idea: AdSense.
Google said, ‘hey, we’re a search engine, we know how to figure out what a
web page is all about, so why not figure out what a page is about and show
ads related to that page content?’ That’s what AdSense does. Now, instead
of the “synthetic engine oil” vendor only having his ad show on the Google search results, he could have his ad show up on websites that were about
engine oil or car maintenance or whatever else the advertiser wanted to
target. Every time somebody clicks on one of those ads, the webmaster
whose site the ad is on gets paid a percentage of the click value, and Google
keeps the rest.
This was a huge boon to the small time website publisher. Before AdSense
they just didn’t get enough traffic to sell ad space or for the big networks to
let them in. A lot of the webmasters still had day jobs, so they couldn’t
exactly get into the product creation and selling business, and the didn’t
have the time or money to try their hand at affiliate marketing either. Now
with AdSense they could put up a content site about their chosen subjects
and actually get paid to write about it!
It didn’t take long for webmasters the world over to catch on. There was no
selling, no customer support, no maintenance, no hassle. You didn’t even
have to select which ads to display because Google figured that out for you!
That’s what makes AdSense so wonderful: you can focus on the content of
your sites and on getting people to your sites, and let AdSense take care of
creating your paycheck for you. It’s so easy to do, and it pays well in tiny
markets where you couldn’t get paid before, like with small hobby sites. Large publishers with thousands or millions of pages spread across dozens
or hundreds of sites were made instantly wealthy due to the program.