Google Adsense on Sites in China

Three months ago, I turned on Google Adsense. It went well during the experiment. It IS an experiment to try new technology or services. Here is a report of with some details to help to get started with Google Adsense. It may be especially helpful for webmasters in China since not many people are familiar with the check and the process to claim the money. Due to the Adsense Terms and Conditions, I cannot disclose details of my earning, click-through rate related to my site performance. Don’t ask me for that. I won’t tell.

At Least it Covers my Site Infrustructure Expense

The money I got is not a big number. The number itself is not exciting at all. However, the fact that a hobby can run on a cost-recovery model is really exciting. At least the small income covered my expenses on this website:

• Domain names. I don’t know why www.net.cn could made so good offer for wangjianshuo.com at 60 RMB (7.22 USD) per year. I paid for 5 years before. The offer is not available now. I always register new domain names at godaddy.com at 7.95 USD / year. Pretty good deal.

• Hosting Fee. The hosting fee for my site is 380 RMB (45.8 USD) per year with PHP, PERL, ASP support and without database. It is 100M disk space at companyCN.com. I experienced server down from time to time. Anyway, I just don’t want to change my hosting since it requires a lot of changes in all the scripts configuration files. As you may know, before that, I hosted the site at my home

Actually that is all the money I spent on this website PARTICULALY. I didn’t count the camera I used, the laptop I used, and most importantly, the time and effort I put into the site.

Language Accepted

Google now accepts sites from all around the world, but they only accept English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish sites. Chinese is not support and according to Google’s Adsense Program Policy, “Ads must not be displayed on any page with content primarily in an unsupported language.” For sites like mine - created, hosted in China but in English - it is accepted.

Blog sites

Google generally doesn’t accept personal pages.

In general, we do not accept personal pages or chat sites into the AdSense program. However, if a site contains targeted, text-based content and/or provides a product or service, we may consider it for participation. (source)

My first application was rejected due to my nature of a blog. I applied the second time later since Google said they welcome site owners to try again if the application is rejected since their program policy may change. My site was accepted at my second try. I guess they may discover that my site is not only talking about my own life, it also talks about a general topic…

Don’t Cheat

Don’t ever think about cheating in Google Adsense Program. Google is a great company. They combined high tech with labor intensive work. I guess they have a large customer service team behind since their responses to my inquiries were fast and to-the-point. They are monitoring the huge traffic of the Adsense program with the help of Google’s patten matching technology. Keep your mouse out of your own Ad. Discussion at WebmasterWorld.com’s Adsense forum revealed lots of webmasters got warning email from Google after they clicked their own Ad by mistake. High quality of the program and the return on investment is the success factor of AdSense and AdWords.

The Check

According to my Google Adsense Payment History Report, my check for November, 2003 was sent out on December 17, 2003. When I got the check, it was already January 8, 2004. According to the Google’s check, the actual time the check was printed was December 19, 2003.

The Money

Check means paper before it is claimed. It seems many banks in China can help to send the check back to U.S to claim the money. I used China Merchant Bank. I paid **20 RMB **(3 USD) as the handling fee and told them my credit card number. They said the money will get to my credit in 3 weeks. Yesterday I checked the card and the money has arrived. So expect two months delay of the payment (one month for Google to send the check and one month for the bank to claim you money).

Conclusion

Google’s Adsense Program may change the Internet. With the website hosting and domain names covered, more people would be happy to build websites and play with it. Personal publishing will boom. Google’s program is unique from other advertisement network since its Ads are generally relative to the content. Both the site owners and the advertisers will love it.

Resources

• Google Adsense Overview

• Google Adsense FAQ

• AdSense Forum on Webmasterworld.com

• AdSenseCharts.com. This free service will show you the charts of your site performance after you paste your AdSense Report from Google.