Now that Arteculate has gotten off the ground (and in quite a hurry since our Tuesday launch, might we add), we wanted to highlight one factor that allows websites like ours to thrive in the internet economy. No, we weren’t referring to our unparalleled insight and incomparable discourse (though we do hear that “content is king”), but rather to the easy-to-implement yet highly-targeted advertising that supports the kind of writing we love to do. To really explain the importance of contextual advertising, it’s worth creating a running example throughout this article. So periodically today, we’ll be discussing structured settlements. While you might not be interested in selling any structured settlements, trust us that this is the perfect example for the article. And if you’re now wondering why providing information about selling structured settlements – those lump sum payments you may opt to receive if you win the lottery — can be a website’s best friend, read on after the jump.
While not without their flaws, services like Google Adsense allow anybody with an idea and some ambition to generate revenue instantly through impressions, clicks, and kickbacks. Impressions are simple presentations of an advertisement for which websites earn a fraction of a penny even without a click. Clicks represent actual interest on your part at the behavioral level and bring in many times more ad revenue than mere impressions. Kickbacks earn the most ad revenue and show not only that an ad influenced your behavior, but that it did so in precisely the way the advertiser wanted it to. As an example, by clicking on one of the items under “Our Favorite Things” to the right and then purchasing any item at Amazon.com (not just one of the ones featured in the ad), Arteculate receives a substantial fraction of the purchase price. So, if you need to do some shopping and you want to support the webzine…
To say that these kind of advertising methods are a boon to websites like Arteculate is quite the understatement; they’re as much the lifeblood that keeps everything running as are the creative juices flowing through our staff. But we’re not here to laud our advertisers; we want to take some time to analyze how the current culture of advertising has changed the kind of content that people deliver. For that, it’s important to get back to the relationship between this article and your possible decision to sell structured settlements for cash.
The best way to monetize most websites is by selling advertisements, and for smaller operations that don’t have a dedicated marketing team, Google Adsense can even out the playing field to a remarkable extent. It allows even small websites to advertise like the big boys – maybe even better, because their ads aren’t based on some agreement between two parties, but on their content. That’s why most of the ads you see on Arteculate relate to technology products (apparently it’s hard to sell “society”), and why, hopefully, the ads on this particular article will give you many different options for selling structured settlements for cash.
As you’re probably beginning to understand, an unfortunate consequence of contextual advertising is that because it’s implemented by robots, it can’t be perfect. The system can be gamed, and thus while Arteculate usually stays far away from sleazy lawyers, our many mentions of selling structured settlements on this particular article ought to generate those sorts of ads. So why selling structured settlements? Well, that particular keyword is one of the most expensive there is. While we could’ve mentioned mulch or raspberries numerous times instead, the level of revenue per impression and per click would be orders of magnitude less than what we earn for every reader who investigates one of the sites that buys your structured settlement (did we mention that you should feel free to check out our sponsored links?). Clearly this kind of strategy might cause writers to key their writing towards certain well-paying terms; in doing so, those writers make themselves pawns of their sponsors just for a paycheck. While not illegal, the practice helps to steer us away from part of what makes the internet so fruitful. Sure, anyone can still write about whatever interests him or her, but if that writer cares about revenue, then there’s an incentive to feature content that’s well-paying rather than meaningful.
So next time you’re browsing through the web, consider for a moment whether what you’re reading is in the true spirit of the author’s vision, or if it might be influenced by impressions, clicks, and kickbacks. We’re not attempting to highlight corruption or immorality, but we do want to emphasize that ads might make the internet a little less unbiased than society thought it was.
What sort of payback are we talking about here? How does the whole system of ads work–is the “robot,” as you write, looking for a few specific words on all sites, or is it “reading” every site and picking out words that it notices without bias?
@ BananaRama – Interesting that you might ask. In terms of payback, we’re talking, cold, hard American dollars. Each click on one of the structured settlement ads will net us more than $1 (that’s right, a simple click — they’re that desperate).
And as for the “robot,” it’s some complicated system that’s one of Google’s trade secrets, but which delivers ads based on overall website content, keywords within articles (you’ll notice that different ads appear on this particular page as compared to the rest of Arteculate), and the content of relevant links. It might even base its ads on cookies stored on the user’s computer, thus tailoring content to previous searches on that computer, etc.
Essentially, adsense is a bit creepy (just remember the uproar when Gmail started featuring contextual advertising!), but it’s very effective. Rather than providing distracting unrelated ads like many traditional websites, adsense hopes to remain relevant and thus delightfully surprise users with ads that are exactly what he was looking for.