AdSense and Google Knol
I’ve been playing around with Google Knol a bit over the past few days, just getting a lay of the land and such. Knol is kind of a cross between Squidoo and Wikipedia, letting users submit articles on pretty much any topic that others can edit and/or comment on (if the authors allow it).
My first impression of the Knol homepage was “uh oh, spam city” because of the topics of the featured articles: cancer, diabetes, and other ailments. Typical fare for a low-quality info site, in other words. But a closer look showed that the articles were actually high quality, written by medical specialists. And there were no ads on those articles, so money wasn’t the motivation for writing them. (Well, maybe Google paid them… but they weren’t MFA articles.) It sounds like Google rounded up some people beforehand to write quality articles for the site.
Still, this is an AdSense blog, so let’s get to the topic everyone’s interested in…. How do you make money with Knol? The obvious answer is through its integration with your AdSense account.
When you register with Knol, you have the option of associating your AdSense account with your user profile. You must do this explicitly, even if your login is the same as your AdSense account login, and you’ll get an email from Google asking you to OK the association. Once you do that, your AdSense info is passed to Knol. There’s some kind of review that happens at this stage, which may take up to 2 weeks to happen. If you’re approved (I wonder if they’re looking to keep out obvious spammers) then AdSense ads will appear on any knols you author and the clicks will go straight to your AdSense account.
Knol has an unfair advantage over other revenue-sharing info sites. Unlike those sites, you don’t have to share your AdSense revenue with Google, since of course they already make money from every AdSense click no matter where it happens. Presumably this is going to make Knol more appealing than Squidoo and other place that take a cut of the AdSense revenue to support their business model.
Expect to see spam show up on Knol, of course. I know of at least one person who’s released a tool to automatically submit articles to Knol. All links on Knol are “nofollow”, however, so from an SEO perspective getting links from Knol to your sites won’t do you much good… but they may still be good for traffic. And then there’s the revenue-sharing…. there’s definitely some appeal there for the shadier types.
What I’m really interested in seeing is if Knol pages get high rankings in search engine results the same way that Google favors Wikipedia pages. Given that everyone’s talking about Knol, presumably there will be a large number of natural links pointing to the Knol site to give it good PageRank. Will that be enough to overtake Wikipedia in the long term? Guess we’ll have to wait and see….
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10 Responses to “AdSense and Google Knol”
[...] AdSense and Google Knol | The Unofficial AdSense Blog Knol has an unfair advantage over other revenue-sharing info sites. (tags: marketing) [...]
I just published my first knol, titled Wikipedia. It might be of interest because of its content, which includes discussions of Wikipedia criticism, along with competitors, including Knol. Also, it’s the first duplicate knol I’ve seen – another article titled Wikipedia was published a few days ago (though it’s pretty much a copy-and-paste job).
Wikipedia has an article about Knol, so it’s only fitting that Knol return the favor. The URL is http://knol.google.com/k/david-blomstrom/wikipedia/1i6e04re3w2kp/5#
David Blomstrom
Candidate for Public Office
& Knolist
Google seems to be monopolizing the Internet, now that you mentioned Knol.
They have got Lively, Orkut and I bet soon there will be an Ebay like site from google.
Never heard of this site. Must be new as it has a PR of 0.
Very informative piece! I enjoy Squidoo and didn’t realize Google had a similar animal until reading this. I am going to check it out now. I am also curious to see how it will battle up against Squidoo and Hub Pages.. Being a Google Baby surely gets more attention. My beef with Squidoo, even though I like it is that one day your lens could be on the first page of Google Searches and then falls off? Ezine Articles don’t seem change placement but could be wrong. Thanks again and Great Blog!
funrivers.com
It’s good that you don’t need to register but can just use your Gmail account. I’ve already started – wrote 2 posts)))
thanks for sharing. Very comprehensive adsense advise. Now i can further create more articles for my web site.
It will be interesting to see how the financial incentive affects the quality and number of articles. Allowing multiple articles on the same subject could also push it over Wikipedia, which seems to be dominated by the subject editors.
At first it does look like Google is monopolizing the internet, however Wikipedia was about to do the same. Wikipedia is nr 1 for almost any search term, if Knol took it’s place publishers could at least generate some revenue from that.
How can I use Knol service?Is there any further information about usage? thanks