Ajay – I really think it’s highly unlikely that a content explosion will ever be enabled by micropayments. Consider that there will always be a plethora of sites offering free content, content which is often highly interesting. Moreover, people are starting to look to sites like http://www.reddit.com and http://www.digg.com to get their news – sites that require subscriptions naturally don’t end up with high rankings on such sites. And those sites are what people are talking about – subscription sites are not in the discussion.

Paul Graham, in his essay at http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html, says “Don’t Maltreat Users.” The key idea behind text-based ads is that they are indeed actually useful, sometimes. Users don’t hate ads, but they certainly hate paying for stuff.

Yeah………. No doubt content is KING, not only these schemes, search engines lays emphasis on content for SEO purposes…. visit me http://www.dewinfotech.com

There will be an explosion of content but it won’t be because of ads. Content will become a service that is subscription-supported, just like software is trying to become. The barrier right now is a serviceable system of micropayments that makes it easy for people to pay for content. Once that happens, advertising will fade away to the ghettoes where people can’t afford to pay for content.

I’m pleased with the results so far. Not as high as Phil’s yet, but my personal web site is pretty new, presently has a tiny readership, and I don’t have a lot of content on there yet. (Excuses, excuses…)

To Phil’s original point, I for one feel quite inspired to spend time developing quality web content with the prospect of being reimbursed through decent web advertising.

Nice, until they cut you off for no obvious reason, lock your account so that you can’t see what happened, send you an email telling you all the money you earned in the last month is being returned to advertisers and not telling you why any of it happened “due to the proprietary nature of our algorithm”.Been there.

Is it really a scam? Is clicking on Google Ads without buying anything (or even, without the intention of buying anything) that different from watching but ignoring television commercials?

I don’t know how many commercials I’ve seen on TV (thousands? tens of thousands?), but it’s probably been on the order of ten times that I’ve actually bought something because I saw it on the commercial. I don’t see Google Ads being much different.

I’m going to start ‘clicking’ like crazy. Phil you may have your Ranger helicopter sooner than later. I think this Google scam will not last too much longer.

Philip, I am curious to know how many page impressions it took to get to thet $60 a day.

Philip, glad to hear that AdSense is working out for you. In many ways, AdSense is built exactly for sites like yours- good content and high relevancy in search results. Please keep us updated on the numbers if they go up/down, etc.

Philip: I read on the Google Adsense web site that there web content providers could choose between the two. I just signed up for Google Adsense today (been deliberating, but finally did it after reading about your experience), so I have no first-hand accounts to share about this matter yet…