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Read this latest BBC report. Seems like YouTube’s revenue sharing model will become a reality in the coming months.

YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.
The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

Speculations about this appeared way before (October 2006) in this article. Here is an excerpt from the article.

YouTube users could be paid for their video clips after the popular website was bought by Google for around $1.6bn (£900m).
Those who upload clips will get a slice of advertising revenue on the pages containing their videos.

This also implies that every Tom, Dick, and Harry will start uploading videos…and that videos you like will be preceeded with some junky advertisements.  But for some, this is a chance to try if their handycam skills can strike some gold.

A commentator “Salman” brought this to my notice through a comment on my last post. Thanks Salman.

You must have seen the nice images near the Google AdSense ads in my right sidebar. Well, on the 18th of this month, Google made it clear that such images are not acceptable. The details are described under the blog post titled “Ad and image placement: a policy clarification“. Let me quote a few lines from the post which would make this very clear :):

What if I place a space or a line between my images and my ads? Would that work?

No. If the ads and the images appear to be associated, inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads will not make the implementation compliant.

Here is an example of an “unacceptable” ad displayed on the post:

Apparently, the images are not really related except the “fruit” part. There is an image of a banana near the ad “Order Grapefruit”.

That’s bad news for people who are using Wordpress plugins like “AdSense Beautifier”.

That also means that the images on the AdSense widget on my right side bar will go away. In fact I think it’s a good excuse for me to get rid of AdSense totally for some time and see how it goes :).

Short intro: Crazyegg.com is a free service that allows you to see where your visitors are clicking so that you can improve the placement of important matter on your website . You set up tests for your webpage and Crazyegg monitors your website for clicks during the test period. Serves as a great tool for AdSense ads placement (well theoretically speaking…if the data are correct).

I am running a test for the past 8 days and checked my results today. I was so estatic after I saw the clicks on my AdSense module in the top left corner of my blog. Here is a heat-map showing the crazy clicking (those spots are where the people clicked):

Crazyegg’s numbers says I received 50 clicks on my Adsense ads in the last 8 days!! Damn, that would mean an enormous increase in my click-through-ratio (CTR defined as the ratio of number of times an ad is clicked on to the number of times the ad is displayed). In the past, I have been averaging like 4~5 clicks a month! Yeah right….unfortunately my joy was extremely short lived. Later, I logged into my AdSense account and found out that there were just 4 clicks in the last 8 days….major let down :(. My first thought was that Google must tricking me or something. But then I cross-checked with Performancing.com and their tracking records support Google’s version of 4 clicks. So it was just 4 clicks after all…..and that sounds about right too given my earlier pathetic CTR.

How the heck did Crazyegg.com come up with 50 clicks? Has anyone else experienced this? Is something wrong with my setup or the Crazyegg just got cracked?

When I ask this question, it obviously means that my AdSense experiment is not working as well as I was anticipating it to be. There are a number of visits to my blog, but no clicks! Made me wonder…who clicks on these ads? Even after much contemplation I did not reach any specfic conclusion. Then, I asked myself an easier question: who doesn’t click on these ads?

I think I found a part of the answer. Ever since the time I have been actively blogging (about the same time I started with the AdSense experiment), I myself haven’t clicked on any AdSense ads on other peoples’ blogs! Now, if all bloggers did it like me and start “not-clicking” on their fellow bloggers’ ads, it’s not going to work for anybody.

So regardless of whether anyone clicks on my ads or not, I am going to play my part in the game. Starting today, I have decided to click on at least one Google ad on every blog (except mine!:)) that I visit. DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS. IT’S A STUPID THOUGHT. You may just get your AdSense account suspended for doing that.

Very few people have ever read this blog. Of those, very few will ever return. This entry is for those very few returning loyals. You will notice a few changes with the layout. I just registered for Google AdSense and posted a few of their not-so-loveable advertisement blocks all over my blog. Let me know if they irritate you. I have absolutely no hopes of earning a dime with these advertisements, and right now they are there only for the sake of my learning about AdSense. If anyone has any experience with AdSense, I would love to hear from you.