After blogging for a while and building up a decent readership, I’ve decided to test out the whole monetization thing. I figured “why not?” – I’ve got nothing to lose, and if I make a few bucks, then I can kind of justify the time I spend (waste?) blogging.

So I’ve decided to give Adsense a serious go here at wpgarage. I read up on it a bit, and took some time to choose certain ad types for certain locations on the page.

So far so good. And I can see that people are clicking.

But here’s where it gets really frustrating: my stats program shows that people are clicking on ads, but these clicks aren’t showing up in the Google Adsense reports. And the few clicks that are showing up in the reports aren’t making any money!

This is annoying, but even worse it strengthens my suspicion that Google can basically do whatever they want and we’d never know. Google could be charging the advertisers for the clicks on their ads without fairly paying me for providing the advertising real estate!

So some questions:

  1. Does anyone know why Google doesn’t pay out for clicks? I read somewhere that it’s because they deem such clicks as problematic or fraudulent. If so, what is this based on?
  2. Is there any type of checks and balances system where we can verify that if Adwords advertisers are being charged for clicks, Adsense users are being fairly compensated?
  3. There are so many monetization systems out there – any suggestions for other systems besides Adsense?

I can see this monetization thing is not going to be so easy…