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Sharing Google Adsense or YPN revenue with users

April 12th, 2006

Is a way for sites which display Adsense or YPN ads next to their user generated/contributed content (ouch!, ouch! and ouch!) to share the ad revenue with these users?

Take for example, a site like Flickr: if I upload a bunch of photos to Flickr and Flickr displays ads next to them, is it greedy of me to expect that I get some fraction of the ad revenue generated from clicks on my user page?

Attention is irresistible alright but money isn’t too bad either.

Or am I already being compensated enough by the disk space and bandwidth that Flickr gives me for free? What if I upgraded to a Pro account? Rather than stop Flickr from showing ads, would it be a good idea to have an option where I say ‘Ok to display ads’ if I get a portion of the revenue?

Currently, even if Flickr wanted to do this, it is not easy to do so because of limits on the Adsense/YPN side. But what if Adsense/YPN gave the publisher the choice to do so? Today both programs let publishers figure out which pages/sections of their sites generate revenue by what are called Channels and Reporting URLs respectively.

Google’s Adsense code has a javascript variable called google_ad_channel that lets publishers report by channel. For example, a newspaper that runs Adsense might have one channel for Sports and one for Entertainment and be able to see which section provides more ad revenue for them. The rub is that

1. there can be no more than 200 channels and
2. worse, they have to be pre-defined.

If instead, Google allowed some publisher-defined javascript variables such as google_pub_1, google_pub_2 etc. that could be inserted into the adsense code and allowed reporting by those variables as well just as they do now by google_ad_channel. This will give publishers a way of having as many dynamic ‘channels’ as they want rather than restricting them to the 200, pre-defined ones as of today. (Ditto with YPN: ctxt_pub_1 and so on). Publishers gain visibility into which of their users (ouch!) is generating revenue for them.

Granted, this does not work on everything (Flickr’s pages by tag for example belong to multiple users) but it is a start. The publisher would be free to decide the split, it could be 10% or 50-50. It seems like people might be more willing to write reviews or upload photos or share their thoughts and ideas in any other fashion if they knew that the website’s publisher was able and willing to share some revenue back with them.

Just saying…

Entry Filed under: yahoo, google, adsense, ypn