I wondered if anyone had seen or tried this:

https://www.google.com/adsense/



The program policies are pretty straightforward and not too restricting with all the obvious things being banned. I liked the fact they placed this in too:
Only one ad unit (horizontal banner or vertical skyscraper) may be placed on each web page. Ads must not be displayed on any pop-ups, pop-unders, error, registration, or "thank you" pages, or in any email

The user agent you will see for this is
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google

If you don't like some of the advertisements appearing, then you can prevent them e.g. if they are selling the same product for cheaper or something like that.

One thing though (small time users note), they don't send checks/cheques out until you've earnt $100 or equivalent, which is quite a lot of clicks. Give it a 1 month trial and if you aren't happy then get out of there. However, they will pay out all accounts at the end of each year, regardless of account balance.

I'm checking it out now so let me know what you think.

Rob

I'm testing it out at
http://www.topfunwebsites.com

and

http://www.topfunwebsites.com/mambo/

I only find a 1/3 relevant to my site, but I may go and ban the rest so that the percentage increases. If you look at http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...nwebsites.com/ then you will probably understand why there are dating and webmaster ads are appearing. I absolutely no idea how most of these sites have popped up though its a bit of a bizzarre collection.

It may cause me some problems in the future though.

Rob

I take it from your post, that you haven't been through the rest of the site here... I have been running it now for days.

I will reserve my comments for now... still too early to have an opinion.

Oops sorry that's the second time I've had my hands slapped today . Actually, since I've had the ads on they have been slowly improving with a caricature shop and Incredible Hulk Toys (which I considered getting myself). I think the more it checks the pages of the site, the more it tunes into what it is about.

Rob

Do you think it's a good idea to place these ads on a forum? Especially since it's (the forums) usually with a sessionid and guests/readers read these forum pages including it (session ids) in the url.

Something I just thought of is that there is a downfall on two places with using focused advertising on the forum. First, because every session ID is being seen as a different page, the google bot is requested every single time, which is intensive for google and slows down the pages.

However, if its possible to have the session id's stripped and each individual thread seen as the same, regardless of session ID, then I think its a cool idea.

Rob

My thoughts exactly, this is why I am SO glad I didn't try to hack the new version of vB3 yet.

This will be priority number 1 when I get my hands on the vb 3 RC version at least. I will try to remove all session ids for non-members (and search engine bots).

I don't know if this will work, but perhaps you could create an ad free theme default for members so that the session ID's wouldn't interfere that way.

Rob

I was first surprised when I read the first post, but after I noticed the post date, I began to smile with a nice nostalgic feeling: ;-)