Making Money through Contextual Advertising

Before the much talked about contextual advertising came through, an online business relied mostly on banner ads. These banners ads, however, were not friendly to a small business, and as time passed, they began to lose popularity.

Then Overture and Google began revolutionizing online advertising using text ads. The idea then was to show text ads in search results when somebody would search a term that has the same keyword as the ads. AdWords was born in 2002, and since then, it has become very popular.

The huge success of AdWords was followed by Google Adsense, a money-making program that would be closely linked to contextual advertising. By definition, when ads that have a particular significance to the content of a certain website show up, it is called contextual advertising. To further illustrate, if a netsurfer visits a site about paintings and that site happens to have Google Adsense, various ads that have something to do with paintings will show up in the webpage. People came to patronize Google Adsense because anyone can practically earn money, not just the big players, through its program.

Another internet giant, Yahoo, also came out with a similar version of Google’s Adsense Program, which it called YPN or Yahoo Publishing Network. It may be premature to even try to compare the two programs and judge which one is better. The YPN, after all, is still in beta version and only targets US sites for now, while Google Adsense has already established its name internationally. Google is more experienced when it comes to targeting ads, thus it has a higher click through rate or CTR. Moreover, Google Adsense has the capability to show image ads in the same format as its text ads. YPN, on the other hand, does not support that feature as of the moment. Another difference between them is that the ad links may be present in Google Adsense, but not in YPN. What the YPN displays are link titles, which Google Adsense does not patronize. Nonetheless, the Yahoo Publishing Network is getting quite a following because, reportedly, you can earn a lot more for every click on the YPN ads.

A web publisher can earn a lot through contextual advertising, regardless of whether it is through Google Adsense or Yahoo Publishing Network. In the end, the decision on which to use lies in you. However, if you are not living in the US, then you do not have any choice but to go for Google Adsense.