Web Cash

At least, that wasn’t my earlier problem.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that this site and Life of Brian were serving up nothing but Big Brother and Big Sister ads. This happened more or less at the same time that I experimented with putting some Adfly links around the site.

It turns out the problem wasn’t some kind of AdSense / AdFly rivalry at all. It was me, making a few changes to other advertising. I had been using ContextWeb (previously AdsDaq) to serve up some ads on these two websites.

The way the service worked, you got paid per impression. You set a PPM price (a bid, basically), and if there was an advertiser willing to pay it then the AdsDaq / ContextWeb ad showed. Otherwise, it defaulted to a “backup ad” – in this case, AdSense.

Well, these weren’t performing very well, so I turned them off. Apparently, when I paused the ads in the ContextWeb dashboard, that killed the script altogether. Instead of defaulting to the backup ads (AdSense), it just showed those public service ads. Doh…

I went back and put the AdSense ad scripts into the theme directly, and regular AdSense ads starting showing up again. It’s nice to know there’s no problem; it’s a bit annoying that it took me two weeks to figure out I was the problem.

I came across this problem on the forums today. How can you randomize which Ad Sense ad to show using Javascript?

The solution, it turns out, is very simple.
(more…)

If you operate a website (like this blog), Google Adsense is probably one of your main streams of revenue. Although you may eventually outgrow Adsense, chances are you’ll have used it at some point.

While looking through my Adsense stats, I noticed an odd trend. This trend suggested a few things about monetizing a site through Adsense – questions that I don’t have an answer for yet, but that I will be looking for.

(more…)