So I did a little work on using the GET interface to AdSense to get back the Google ad for a specific page. I then wrote some regex to extract the key URLs and text to turn it into something like this.

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This is plain old html and could be fairly easily inserted into an RSS feed. It's got all the right URLs so that a click through should credit my Google account. I'd run a cron job to get the Google Ad for each blog entry and then merge it into the RSS when that was requested. Probably by adding it as the last line of selected blog entries.

But as I tested it, I noticed that only a few of my blogs actually generated a targeted ad. The vast majority never find any interesting key words and I get what looks like a default Ad for the site as a whole . This is a blog so you must want an ad for blogging systems. Well no actually. But does this mean that I write too much stuff that is just not a target Ad writers want to hit? Or have I hit a fundamental limitation in AdSense that it's actually just not very good or doesn't have a wide enough inventory of Ads?

Anyway back to the experiment. It looks to me like I would have to just strip all the generic Blog Ads out as they are going to be pretty annoying in an RSS feed. I'm a bit disapoointed by this. And given that Google don't want me to try this anyway, I'm not sure I can be bothered to take the next step in the experiment and actually start adding the Ads into the feed.

So is Overture any better? Although I'm sure I've seen Overture Ads, I don't think I've ever been led to the Overture signup page. Should I go and seek it out? Would it earn me more money? Are they more RSS friendly?


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[ 21-Nov-04 2:08pm ] [ , , ]