Riddle Me This
I just want to call your attention to the Google Adsense ad down on the sidebar here. (You only see the ads on the main page, not the single post view. To get to the main page, click on “Wordout” or “Home” up above.)
Awhile back, I thought it would be nice to show you who around the world was looking at Wordout, so I put the “Getting Wordout, Around The Earth” cloud over there in the sidebar. A few days after that, my Google Adsense ads became pointless. It seems that with cities like Øksendrup(Denmark), Umeå(Sweden) and Skövde(Sweden) displayed on the page, Google chooses to serve up ads in foreign languages.
And it’s not just cities. When the article “Festival of Lights” was published here, suddenly there was an inordinate number of Hanukkah ads, displayed quite properly in Hebrew. Even though Hanukkah has finished for this year, the ads still appear. (And I still can’t get the Hebrew translations to work!)
At first, I didn’t mind ads written in languages that not only I, but many of you cannot read. It was something of a novelty. But it’s starting to borderline on just plain dumb. Each day Wordout pages are viewed in several different languages. I see that in my stats from Feedburner and Google Analytics. But the overwhelming majority of readers view this site in English. I’ve been able to translate some of these ads using Russian as the base language.
They’re Getting Clicks… Or Are They?
So why are the overwhelming majority of my Google (image) ads served up in Russian, or Hebrew? In context, less than 1% of the text on this site has been written in a language other than English. Plus, I’ve noticed (through MyBlogLog stats) that even though these ads are getting clicked, Google says none of them are clicked. Ever.
I didn’t expect to make any real money through Adsense, but it makes me wonder: Is something wrong with Google’s monitoring? Or is MyBlogLog just making it up? Somebody’s lying about it, that’s for sure. One thing I do know for certain:
Google Adsense just doesn’t make sense.
I am Jon, and I’m just saying…