I was going to wait another day or so to talk about it, but I will explain it now. I do business with Google a lot. I am a huge fan and supporter (and customer) of Google. They have given me great service and have helped the businesses I have associated them with immeasurably. Plus their search engine rocks. In short, can't say enough good about them.

So, while doing my usual business with them, I came across their service which they call AdSense, which is a relevance based ad system that pays per click. I signed up to see if their technology can work on the fly fast enough to keep up with our forum. Less than 2 days in, I am impressed with what it can do. It's not perfect, but a good percentage of the time, it can figure out a relevant ad to show for a particular topic of a thread or song. When it can't it puts up public service ads that we get no credit for. But public service is cool.

Most importantly, since I added that test code to the bottom of the thread message page and the bottom of the songs (now less than 24 hours), The Mudcat has raised $1.64. That is pretty easy money. So this morning I started asking questions like: What if I moved it to the top of those pages? What about other pages? What about my promise to not do banner ads? What if I posted a thread encouraging our users to be patient with their presence and to click them now and then?

Now, the reality of Mudcat is that we have our core members that spend a lot of time here, whom I care about very much. What we also have is millions of passersby that stop through every month. It's probably 80% strangers, but lets just say that 50% of the Mudcat traffic is members, and 50% is strangers. So the time and expense of running the Mudcat half due to anyone that might read this message, and half from people we know won't. Currently we're funded only from our members. Not quite fair, so maybe this is a way to balance the game.

Anyway, I just started thinking about this yesterday. So far, I can't ignore that in less than 24 hours, unannounced, and at the bottom of only 2 pages, we've already gotten 9,230 impressions, 15 clicks and $1.64.

So what do you think?