What is Adsense?

AdSense is an advertising system provided by Google which lets website owners make money by showing ads on their websites. The ads come from Google's incredibly successful AdWords advertising system and uses Google's search technology to provide ads that are more relevant to the web page content they are shown on.

For example, consider a web page about winter sports. Google's search technology already lets Google find out what the web page is about - this is what a search engines does. So if an advertiser is interested in getting their AdWords ads displayed when someone types "winter sports" into Google, why not combine technologies to deliver ads about winter sports on web pages about it?

AdSense does this automatically and when someone clicks on an AdSense ad, Google charges the advertiser for the click and shares this revenue with the website owner. The amount the website owner gets paid per click depends on how much the advertiser is willing to pay for the traffic which in turn will depend on how capable the owner is at turning his web traffic into profits. It will also depend on how much other people are prepared to pay to advertise in the same place because the AdWords system is really one greart advertising market place where people compete to buy and sell advertising space with prices varying from one minute to the next.