blogging for baht

the good folks at blogspot have been promoting their (google's) adsense program which i took a look at the other day.

in a nutshell, adsense lets a web author add text advertisements to his or her site and pays when a reader sees something interesting and clicks on the ad. the googly part of this is that google scans the page and adds only relevent ads pertaining to the content. certainly an improvement over the old banner ad system which required a great deal of manual maintenance.

this page tells you what ads would show if a particular website participated in the adsense program. for example winterson.com would yield mostly ads for hotels in bangkok and around thailand- probably the most relevant topic, though not sure that my ramblings attract many people seeking hotel reservations.

this excellent article goes into more detail about adsense and gives some useful tips for creating a profitable website. i agree that the best way to make money is to establish a strong focus, so blogs that talk about durian one day and crashing space capsules the next probably will never amount to much. but there's no reason to believe that blogs that deal with specific topics can't attract a regular readership that could translate into some real money.

the implications are interesting. much of what's great about the internet is peoples' dedication to writing about what they know about, for free. whereas some larger more professional sites make money via advertising revenue the one-man hobby authors usually don't want to get involved in advertising- the trouble of doing so versus the potential return just doesn't make it attractive. with adsense (this is starting to sound like a commercial) after 15 minutes the ads can be set up and the author can start making money- perhaps just enough to cover the costs of running the site, but often more, and sometimes a lot more.

for folks living in developing countries around the world this could be a good opportunity. for example one might not work full time on a golf course website back home for $1000 a month, but here in thailand that's real money- enough for people to quit their jobs and do it full time. and if that's what their real passion was anyway, then everyone wins.