Google Adsense versus Adwords

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

When I asked Google about an adsense account (which enables you to put Google ads on your website and get compensated for them) they mentioned the AdWords grant program to me. AdWords lets you advertise your site via google ads on other people's sites, including Google Search.

The AdWords grant program offers free AdWords accounts to nonprofits: (You get a daily budget of $329.)
http://www.google.com/grants/

However, you can't have an AdSense account too.

Since we are conflicted about ads, and much more likely to reach agreement on specific company ads than general google ads, I recommend we apply for a Google AdWords grant.

If we get it, is there anyone with experience in AdWords, SEO or advertising that would like to help run it? (The application itself requires just a few things like target audience and sample campaign slogans that we'd need to think about.)

Thoughts? All for applying for a free AdWords account?

Stormy

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 3:45 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

Hi,

Stormy Peters wrote:
> I agree that if it's even a percentage of that, it might be worth it.
>
> What would people think of trying it out for a couple of months? We
> could start with Google ads to see how well ads work and once we have an
> idea of how much to expect, we could solicit ads directly from companies.

One important thing to bear in mind (and I'm digging into second-hand
memory banks here) is whether this would affect our relationship with
the various companies who donate bandwidth & hosting services. I don't
think OSU OSL has any issue with this, but IIRC, hosting in Red Hat's
colo had a "no ads" condition attached.

Worth investigating, at least - if we end up with $150K advertising
revenues a year and an extra $300K hosting costs to pay, it would be a
bad deal.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org