Member Driven Adsense

[MrEyes]

I am currently looking into various ways of attracting new users and existing users into using the vBulletin blogging software and creating quality content.

One of the things I am considering is allowing users to display their own adsense code in the header of their blog.

Yes, I would lose out on some revenue but I think that if you consider the big picture it might actually be beneficial to the site, i.e. quality content = more viewers = more viewers to the rest of the site = more registrations = more revenue from subscriptions/adsense (elsewhere on the site)

I do not think there is a mod for this, so I will need to code it however before starting on this:

Has anybody tried to do anything like this? Or does anybody have any comments on the idea?

[Guest210212002]

This would depend on how you have your adsense set up now, really. There is a limit to how many ads you can display per page, iirc it's 3 text/image ads and 2 link units (or something thereabouts).

Any ad space you give your members would take away from your page total, so just keep that in mind. For logged in users I only show 1-2 ad slots depending if they are contributors or not. If you do give a slot to your members, I'd make sure you set a fixed number of ads that they can run - perhaps limit it by character count or so. You don't want people to be able to just paste all 5 slots in a row into their blog.

[MrEyes]

Currently the blogs displays a single Content 728x90 Leaderboard that uses my Adsense code. The intention is to allow members to replace this with their own single leaderboard.

In order to prevent people from insert multiple ads the, currently non-existent, mod would ask for the variables, not the full markup. So for example if the full markup was:


<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-123456789";
google_ad_slot = "987654321";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>


The member configuration would require:


Ad Client
Ad Slot


From there the mod would generate the rest of the markup for the page.

One of the things I am not sure of, and this is a question for google, is if this is allowed under Google Adsense TOS. The member would have to have an adsense account and IIRC google manually check all sites before giving the account. So they may say that the domain already has an account, or if the member already has an account for "memberdomain.com" can they use the same account for "myforum.com"