THE CRACK

Today when I was analyzing the site report from Google Analytics I saw that someone has used the keyword “adsense pay scales” on Google to reach my site. I have posted an article regarding adsense once before(click here to read it) but I have never searched for “adsense” or a keyword like that on Google to see whether there’s my blog. So I searched for “adsense pay scales” and it gave me a search result page with the phrase “Results 1-10 of about 662,000″.

Then I visited page by page looking for my blog but I couldn’t find it. But the most surprising thing happened to me was that there was only 818 results. Then what is 662,000? Still there’s the phrase “Results 811 - 818 of about 662,000″ but the 818th result is the last one.

At the end of the page there was a link to repeat the search with omitted results so first I thought the other results have been omitted. So, I did the search again and this time their number of results was 657,000. With the omitted results they have omitted about 5,000 results! What a surprise. Anyway here again I ended up with 1000 results but still with the phrase “Results 991 - 1000 of about 657,000″. This is getting more and more interesting!

So, I searched for few other keywords to see whether the same thing happens and yes it did. Always Google gives us a meaningless big number but the actual number of results are much more smaller. Then I tried the same thing with Yahoo and it also gave me the same result.

Please if you have encountered this before or if you know what’s going on leave a comment here. Your opinions are also welcome.

As my father is a computer instructor, computers were never strange to my life. I’m working with computers for more than 15 years. But when it comes to internet it is something different. About seven years ago we got a internet connection which was very slow and expensive. It was a dial up connection and in that time we have to dial to a number in Colombo. As I’m living in Ratnapura, our telephone bill in the first few months was more than Rs.6000. So you can see how much it was expensive!

In that time Yahoo was the most popular e-mail provider and they provided a 6MB free mailbox. Also with the help of Yahoo I created a personal home page and published in their free domain(blogging was not much popular at the time). That site is no longer online now. Within few months I published my second web site called “Math Tricks” which was never upgraded. But the site is online even today.

Today the internet and its concepts are much more advanced than those days and fortunately the internet connections are also powerful.

It is only about two months that I came to know about the Google Adsense program. First I thought it is a great chance to earn something with very little effort. I’m sure you’ll also think like that when you first hear about it. But it’s not so easy always.

According to what I have seen in the last two months most people create a web site just after they came to know about Adsense just to make money. Their ambition is not to provide something useful for the visitors but to make revenue. So they put some garbage into their sites and ask their friends to visit the site and click on the ads (that’s what I’ve seen). But here what happens;

After few email campaigns and getting help from friends you can earn something around $20-$40 within few weeks. But Google withholds your earnings until your account reaches US$100. But if you created a web site just to earn revenue and if your content is poor you won’t have anymore visitors. So, you stuck without knowing what to do. And you won’t be paid.

These pending payments are recorded on Google’s balance sheet as “accrued revenue share”. According to wikipedia, the sum of all these pending money in the end of year 2006 is little over US $370 million. So you can see how much money they are holding which is actually owned by Adsense users.

But here I’m not asking you to stop using Adsense. It’s actually a great way of earning for the small scale web site owners where they can’t find sponsors. But the first thing you have to be aware is that you have to be able to earn at least US$100. So, you need to have a master plan. The content of the web site should be good enough to attract the visitors and you have to make sure to have a constant rate of (or increasing number of) visitors.

So again I’m warning you, use Adsense if you can earn at least US$100 or otherwise you’ll have nothing.