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

15 thoughts on “Google Adsense on Sites in China

  1. Cheat nearly destroied all credit of chinese webmaster in .com dynasty.

    At that time nearly all famous ADS company have following item in his terms like below:

    “We rejected all application from webmaster in china, or site hosted in china. Because of there are too many cheat of chinese wemasters.”

    It is a terrible disaster to all honest chinese webmasters at that time.

  2. Help! I’m in Shanghai and now can not access my adsense login page has it been blocked.

    Also I need to post to google groups but they are blocked here too- how to?

    Drop me an email please.

    Rob24hrsbiz@hotmail.com

  3. I am afraid I don’t have any better idea. I don’t understand why google.com/adsense will be blocked. I hope the page serve ads will not be blocked.

  4. Hello,

    AdSense is a cool program, but it has a few „underwater stones” which one should know not to be disqualified! So if you will get a message from Google “It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on the ads on your web pages. We have therefore disabled your Google AdSense account.” etc then you should not be surprised, because most likely it was due to the invalid clicks.

    Here are a few insider tips:

    1. Never click on your Google advertisements with the public IP address that you use to log-on into your Google account (they register it and thus may disable your account!) (if you do not know how to obtain your public IP address go to http://www.askprofi.com);

    2. If someone wants to ruin your Google Adsense, he may do a few hundred of clicks within one hour on your Google advertisements and you are lost! There is no simple defence against this at the moment. AdSonar is more advanced in this case because they allow you providing a list of IP addresses which can be blocked (not counted as valid clicks). AdSense from Google is weak here.

    3. Pay attention to the following: the rate (number of clicks * 100 / impressions) should not be more than 10 %. If > 10 %, it may become suspicion for Google.

    4. Your web site users are not interested in Google advertisements? There is a simple method on how to change it (www.askprofi.com).

    Best Regards,

    Profi

    Free software development support and more …

    http://www.askprofi.com

  5. i am a newbie,but i think that google adsense will be useful for many small websites to pay the hosting and domain fee.

  6. I am glad I stumble across this thread. I have just started putting Google ads on my sites after reading an exuberant report in the Washington Post. My results so far has been quite pathetic :). Even a McJob would pay several times more. But then it is fun.

    I am starting a forum/blog dedicated to this subject in the hope that we can pool our resources to optimise our effort. If you have any suggestions, please post it here or at my site. I hope Jianshuo would not mind that I use the intelligence gathered here for my forum.

  7. Google is NOT effective in China. They don’t serve Chinese language ads so what’s the point. Few click on my ad sense site becuase of this reason. When will Google have their act together?

  8. AC-Baidu helps foreign business to do online and offline marketing in China. Our primary services are to help foreign business to run pay per click campaign on Baidu.com, which is the leading search engines in China, with more than 70% online search market share.

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  9. Interesting… I might try some of this on my blog, too. It’s quite interesting how you sometimes stop being innovative and just go for an accepted solution without actually trying to improve it… you make a couple of good points.

    internet advertising

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