Popular websites can earn cash with Google's targeted advertising, writes Danny O'Brien.
Paul Dunne has that most elusive of creatures, a website that makes him money.
Admittedly, it's not much money, less than €30 a month, but then, Mr Dunne's site is just a hobby: a few pages called "Shamrockshire", where he puts his "random mumblings", and the transcript of his unpublished book A History of Ireland in Song. The cash comes from the advertisements he runs on selected pages, advertisements that are served by the Californian Internet search-engine giant Google.
"It's pin money, but I don't have to do any work. I just stick a bit of extra HTML code into my web pages, and the money trickles in."
Mr Dunne receives a small amount of cash for any visitor to his site at http://dunne.home.dhs.org/ who clicks on the links in the advertisements. Google counts up the clicks, and when the sum totals more than $100 (€88.50), they send him a cheque.
Internet advertising has been around since 1995, and has recently grown more prominent, with intrusive animated and "pop-up" advertisements scattered across many Web pages. But traditionally, advertisement companies have been interested only in buying space on heavily-trafficked sites, with hits - and readerships - measured in the millions.
In June that changed, when Google announced that it would be extending its advertisement placement service to any site that passed a few simple content tests.
Mr Dunne's generally gets less than 500 hits a day (which means fewer actual readers than that). Only a handful click on the banner advertisements that appear on his site, but that's enough to register a few dollars per day.
Other sites have done much better. Rupert Farrow of Associate Programs, a professional advertising site designer, earns more than $1,000 a month via the program.
Popular Web locations like tourist information sites and chat areas are also set to do well from the scheme.
Katie Jones has run a British chat site, ukchat.com, since 1998 and never made any money from it. "We had a few insane offers during the boom, but never felt that they would go anywhere. Traditionally, advertisers weren't interested in chat forums, and those we could attract irritated our users with 'pop-under' advertisements."
Within a month of running the new Google advertisement, she's made around €1,200, and has been able to recoup her hosting costs.
Google's relaxing of its conditions is, the company says, connected to its purchase of Santa Monica company Applied Semantics earlier this year. Applied Semantics' principal product was AdSense, a system that allows advertisers to target advertising based just on the text of the website on which it appears.
Google can now automatically decide to place, for instance, bridal gown advertisements on a site that mentions weddings. Previously, advertising companies would have to spend manpower tweaking advertisements for each site they advertised on. The new small site service is named after the previous Applied Semantics service.
Targeted advertising is seen as beneficial for both advertisers and those showing the advertisements. Advertisers prefer sites which attract genuine customers, and advertising space providers receive more money if the banners are relevant enough to be clicked upon.
Not everyone is convinced that advertising on external sites is as good as advertising on the search engines themselves. "Internet users coming across these advertisements likely aren't in 'search mode'," says Ms Pamela Parker, managing editor for ClickZ, an online advertising newsletter, which means that they may not be on the look-out for marketing or offers.
And Google's targeted advertising is not perfect. Mr Dunne has part of his site dedicated to information on the ongoing case of the IRA double-agent code-named Stakeknife. Sure enough, the banner advertisements on that page detected the content: and began offering readers great deals on steak knives.
Other problems with automatic targeting include finding your competitor's advertising appearing on your own webpage. The search engine provides methods for preventing specific advertising from appearing on your site, but no way of discovering current or future advertisers.
The content of advertisements can also be a cause for concern. "I'm cautious about running the service on our teen section," says Ms Jones, "I don't want inappropriate messages appearing there."
Local advertising, too, is difficult for the algorithm to recognise. While Mr Dunne's site displays many advertisements from Irish companies, this is because much of his site mentions his Irish roots.
Local companies won't necessarily appear on other sites which make less of their Irish origins - although advertisers can choose to show their advertisements to only visitors based in Ireland. Mr Dunne himself lives in Hamburg, Germany.
Google competitor Overture, whose international offices are based in Dublin's East Point Business Park, says that itwill be rolling out more locally targeted advertising. The advertising company, which was recently purchased by Yahoo!, will use the service to better locate advertising space for its 88,000 traditional advertisers.
Internet consultants Jupiter Research say that advertisements placed with search engines like Google and Yahoo are driving the revival in Internet advertising, whose fortunes collapsed after the dotcom bust. The "paid search" market (advertisers who pay to appear in search engine rankings) measure $1.6 billion in 2003, a growth of 48 per cent from the previous year. By 2008, Jupiter predicts companies will spend $4.3 billion on search, one-third of the total estimated online advertising budget.
Mr Dunne is certainly happy to take his cut. Although he admits to rarely paying much attention to Internet advertising himself.
"The funny thing is," he says, "I use Lynx [a text-only Web browser], which doesn't display adverts, so I never see them. Thank goodness not everyone's not like me, hey?"
