Well, looks like I was right. Google's has officially announced the AdSense API beta program, and I'm sure a lot of publishers are going to be lining up to try it. But you'll have to meet some stiff requirements — they're interested in sites with 100,000 or more daily page views.

As I thought, sites that use the API will get a share of the revenue earned by publishers they've signed up, though it's not clear to me if that share extends to the publisher's entire AdSense revenues for life or if there are limits/restrictions on it. Wouldn't that be sweet if you signed up someone for AdSense and they then went on to setup a big site that was raking in $10,000 a day or more in AdSense? This will be very interesting indeed.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

In my mission to educate AdSense publishers, I sometimes stumble across examples of publishers who are breaking the rules, perhaps unknowingly. I'm not a big fan of the AdSense referral buttons (they're not big money-makers) but if you choose to use them on your site you must understand the rules about their use. Here are a couple of egregious referral button uses that will land you in trouble with Google. I meant to do this yesterday, but then I had to break the story about the the new AdSense API.

The first example is from CouponMountain:

While the “FREE SIGN UP” text and the arrows are cleverly done, they also violate this rule in the AdSense terms and conditions:

5. Prohibited Uses. You shall not, and shall not authorize or encourage any third party to: (i) directly or indirectly generate queries, Referral Events, or impressions of or clicks on any Ad, Link, Search Result, or Referral Button….

You can't do anything to encourage visitors to click referral buttons other than use vague phrases like “I highly recommend you join Google's AdSense program”, without calling attention to the referral buttons. Now, I've always thought this rule rather silly for the AdSense referrals because of the time delay in getting referral payments, but the rules are the rules. (The example above reminds me of the first edition of Joel Comm's AdSense e-book that recommended using big red arrows to point visitors right at the ads… oops… that was taken out of later editions…)

The second example is from RateItAll, the site that accidentally broke the embargo on the AdSense API yesterday:

There are two problems here. One is that they're encouraging clicks on the referral buttons, as with the previous example. The second is that they're using too many referral buttons (there's actually a third one that you can't see in this screenshot, at the bottom of that page). According to the AdSense program policies, which are part of the terms and conditions:

A single referral button per product may be placed on a page up to a maximum of 4 buttons, in addition to the ad units, search boxes, and link units specified above. Referral buttons are considered to be ‘Google ads’ for purposes of these program policies.

Ooops again, three buttons referring the same product (AdSense) is two buttons too many. Plus there's the fact that their placement of those buttons looks pretty ugly, too.

Let's see how quickly those pages get modified…

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

If the AdSense API is not a pipe dream (we're still waiting for official confirmation from Google) then it indicates a concerted effort by Google to increase the reach of its AdSense program and to sign up reams of new AdSense publishers. Which will (despite the overblown worries about click fraud) provide an even larger venue for advertisers, especially those looking to reach the fertile demographics that use social networking and community content sites. Imagine if MySpace were to sign up with this program and allow their pimply-faced users to make a bit of extra cash by showing contextual ads in their profiles? AdWords advertisers could easily run MySpace-targeted campaigns, for example, just by using site targeting.

Done right, and if they can sign up the right sites as partners, this could be a huge money maker for Google. After all, once someone's signed up as an AdSense publisher and they've gotten a taste of what it's like to monetize content, it's inevitable that some of them would branch out to create regular sites and blogs that are monetized via AdSense. And AdWords advertisers would be able to reach an even larger pool of sites, especially some high-traffic hot properties. It'll be interesting to see what happens with this.

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.