Bloggers at Venetto: On Adsense

Given a chance during the small meeting of bloggers at Venetto, I would have had this to say:

Initially, the prospect of earning money through Google Adsense was one of those great ideas that would somehow change the blogsphere for years and years to come.

Suddenly, people who registered with free blog services like blogger-dot-com could, upon enrolling with Google Adsense, receive some money for blogging their brains out and sharing with the world glimpses of their lives -- their most honest thoughts and feelings about their inner and outer worlds. At last, in a way, these people could call themselves 'publishers' in the sense that they were churning out content people would read and earn some revenue whenever people reading their stuff clicked through the Google ads strategically posted on their page.

Under the Google Adsense program, bloggers and website masters could earn $100 or more from click throughs. In the Philippines where the exchange rate is Php 55.00 to $1.00, this presents a tantalizing proposition. A hundred dollars a month could pay for a DSL connection and monthly installments on a brand new computer or a digital camera. Or help pay the electric and phone bills.

But the reality of earning through Google Adsense comes as a bit of a let down for the following reasons:

1. The blogger/website master/publisher has no control over what ads are displayed on his or her page. While the Google Adsense program says a lot good things about its contextual ads and the technology behind it, it is not as responsive as one would want it to be. Bloggers who blog about various topics will most definitely have ads that are not relevant to their most current entries. Moreover, it will increase their chances of getting ads that pay zilch for any click through and this creates some pressure for bloggers to limit their blogging to certain topics, if they want to earn money from the products of their intellect.
2. The blogger/website master/publisher does not know how much each particular ad pays. It would be great if, under some arrangement, publishers could be given a choice among ads even if their choice of ads would bind them to certain conditions -- such as having the proper background to qualify as an authority of some sort, limits on the topics that one can blog about, etcetera.
3. The hundred dollar quota is simply too high to be reachable in a months time for most bloggers who earn just a little above three cents a day if at all. For all practical purposes, most blogs are just one long page and under the Google Adsense program, your are only allowed to display three Google Ads per page. The law of averages are on the side of website masters who have more pages to put Google Ads on and therefore more chances of earning through click throughs -- not to mention the fact that the content of the webpage is static (remains unchanged for a period of time), immediately making it friendlier for contextual ads since the context for the ads doesn't change as often as blogs.

Despite these drawbacks, I still think Google Adsense is worth a try but don't quit your job yet.

There are a host of ads that promise enormous sums of money if you buy their secret strategy for earning Adsense Millions. But really, if you buy into this, you might as well buy a barrel of snake oil from me.

Bloggers at Venetto

It was the dedication ceremony of Hazel Recheta's four month old kid, Chaz, at Venetto along Visayas Avenue in Quezon City.

For those of you who are wondering what a dedication ceremony is, I can probably arrange a one on one seminar with Hazel's Pastor and he'll dutifully explain the intricacies of the ceremony as well as give you all the relevant passages in the Holy Bible.

Going through the ceremony was as close to an out of body experience as I could get -- my body was there but my mind was definitely in the resto's kitchen conducting an investigation of sorts and interrogating the chef.

Among the notables were fellow bloggers, Jove Francisco, Alwyn Alburo, and Joseph Morong. Avid bloggers all.

Right after the second round (by my count, since my wife Arlene and I arrived unusually early), after the small talk about what everybody was doing now, the discussion turned briefly to blogging and journalist bloggers.

Jove talked about it as if it were a movement among journalists, at least in Metro Manila, and how the community of journalist bloggers were THE THING nowadays. Personally, I have yet to find out if this is an organized movement or a social phenomena such as those described in Gladwell's The Tipping Point (which is a very good read, if you are wondering about how the dynamics of social interactions can be harnessed for marketing products and ideas).

Apparently, according to Jove, there are a number of journalists (both in print and broadcast) who have taken up blogging for a number of reasons and among them was to provide an inside take on their lives as journalists -- some personal snippets of the day behind the news that either don't get recorded on video or can't get printed or aired.

Jove, for example, writes entries on the scenes behind the news from Malacanang... There are days when his blogs are updated as many as three to five times in a single day providing a running account of the various goings on in the Palace -- from the Malacanang Press Corps dealings with the information bureaucracy headed by Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye to his observations on unfolding events such as the recent 2005 SONA. What is great about reading Jove's blog is that his entries come from the perspective of a reporter in Malacanang who has been through at least three Presidents -- though, Jove is certainly younger than a certain trilobite reporter who has been there for ages -- his accounts are tempered and disciplined as well as amusing.

Alwyn's blog is more personal in nature as well as those of Tina Panganiban Perez.

I have yet to see Joseph Morong's blog and something tells me this might be an interesting read.

My wife just started here blog a few days ago, as a way of recording her progress in painting her second reproduction of Van Gogh's irises.

Among the many things discussed, one thing that cropped up but was not fully discussed was the idea of bloggers earning some money through advertisements placed in their blogs.

Jove had said that in a recent blogger's conference (there are 8,000 Filipino bloggers, according to Jove) that it the idea of blogging for a few bucks through advertisements was acceptable, perhaps in the vein of subsidizing internet time and what not.

Of course, those of you who have been reading my blog will know that I have been using Google Adsense and have been writing about various ways of earning money through this affiliate program.

What Jove had broached, I think, was the possibility of local advertisers (Philippine companies) advertising directly through Filipino bloggers. This is a tantalizing prospect, in my view, because it holds the promise of providing bloggers with advertising revenue under a more transparent system.

Bloggers who really do come up with useful content (such as real accounts of current events, intelligent commentaries, reviews on various products/services, and such) deserve to get paid for their efforts.

One thing for sure is that a number of global companies subscribe to RSS feeds and to some extent use bloggers' writings in a number of ways -- among them is to gain feedback which can be used to fine tune their product or service, provide data for marketing and public relations, etcetera. This is a good thing for them because they can get it for FREE.

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