Aerospace Software Ltd.

Affiliates How-to Guide

Background

Many moons ago, in 1995, shortly after the President of Vice and Gore invented the internet, Amazon.com started a commission program. If you would publish a book review on your web site and link to Amazon and someone would follow that link and buy the book, then you would earn a few dollars in commission. I subscribed to that program and actually earned a few hundred dollars, but eventually got bored with it and let it lapse.

For the next several years, I paid for my web site out of my own pocket.

In the mean time, many kinds of advertisements flooded the web and we got inundated with flashing, rolling, popping and floating advertisements of all shapes and sizes. That experience made me determined never to put any advertisements on my web site.

Yet, here I am today, with advertisements on my web site again. What changed? The pendulum swung back. We now have context aware advertisements, that are not obnoxious and mostly in text form. Google re-invented the age old newspaper classifieds and made them electronic. The adverts are now actually useful.

The Leader of the Pack

If you are running a web site, head over to http://adsense.google.com and open an account. It will take a few days, Google will audit your web site to ensure that it is acceptable to them and then you are good to go.

The adverts are small Javascripts that you place in your web pages. They have a wizard that you use to generate them and then you just copy and paste. It can't be any easier. When a page loads, it pulls a set of relevant adverts from Google - quite neat.

Use your browser to view the source code of this page and you'll see.

All my web pages consist of three parts: Header, body and footer. The adverts are in the header and footer, which are the same for all pages. Apache is set up to use server side includes to assemble the pages and dish them up in one piece to your browser.

Follow the Leader

Yahoo recently followed suit and they are also starting up the same thing. You can already see their advertisements on CNN. That is a great improvement on CNNs own Atwola advertisement server, which I have blocked in my web browser, because it serves up irritating flashing crud. So at least Time Warner is learning too.

The Bottom Line

There are various payment methods in use, but the advertisers of course need to retain some form of control. Therefore, obnoxious pop-up adverts are usually paid per impression, while lower key adverts are paid per click. You have to decide which method works for your type of web site and clientele.

The Google system is quite neat and they show you the number of page impressions and clicks for different advert channels, so you can get an idea of what works and what doesn't.

The yahoo system should be similar, since they are obviously basing their system on Google's.

Payment varies wildly since it is based on what the advertiser paid for his spot - a few pennies. You sure won't get rich from this, but it could offset the cost of your web site, turning it into a self funding hobby. Once set up, the system is maintenance free, so it is certainly worth doing.