With the tagline "share what you know, rake in the dough," HubPages makes it easy for virtually anyone to distribute expertise and knowledge about almost any topic and earn money in the process. Explains Co-founder and CEO Paul Edmondson, "We provide an online venue for people to share their passions with the world, and in turn we share the profits with them."
Together with Jay Reitz and Paul Deeds, Edmondson established HubPages early in 2006 and built an easy to use set of tools so that within minutes people can start publishing their own articles and web pages, or Hubs. Because the main goal of HubPages is to share profits, people who publish there can start earning income almost immediately.
From the beginning, Edmondson and his team knew they had to generate advertising revenue for publishers. However, the challenge was twofold: to attract advertisers across a hugely diverse set of topics, and to ensure that relevant ads appeared on the right pages. The ideal solution was a contextual advertising service that could deliver ads relevant to a wide body of published content. Edmondson heard about the Google AdSense API, a free service that would let him integrate Google AdSense into HubPages. Using the AdSense API, the team could enable individual HubPages content producers to create and manage their own AdSense accounts.
"Our publishers understand their own content, as well as the types of contextual ads that will enhance it," explains Edmondson. "The minute we heard about the AdSense API, we knew it made sense to integrate AdSense into our site so that content providers could open their own accounts through us."
According to Edmondson, it was easy and fast to get started. It took less than a week to integrate AdSense into the HubPages site and to begin offering AdSense accounts to HubPages content producers. "The AdSense API is a great way for us to aggregate ads across a broad spectrum of commercial and non-commercial topics to match our producers' content," he says. "For a company like us that has a hugely diverse body of material that needs to be matched with relevant ads, it's a great option."
To help HubPages content producers succeed, Edmondson's team worked to customize and place their AdSense for content ads. They have discovered, for instance, that ads appearing inline with the first paragraph of content are particularly effective, as well as those centered at the top of the page. "People who have not had experience with contextual publishing often do not know how to format and place ads," he observes. "In addition to providing a free contextual advertising service on AdSense, we can also help make our content producers' ads perform well so they're earning as much as possible."
The HubPages team and their content producers are pleased with the quality and relevance of AdSense ads that appear on the site. And content producers are also excited because they can focus on producing their content instead of focus on the technical intricacies of contextual advertising. As Edmondson notes, "Content producers commonly ask, 'Can I really make money doing this?' and the answer is 'Yes.'"
Since integrating AdSense into the HubPages site using the AdSense API, Edmondson says that AdSense is now responsible for 90 percent of overall company revenue. "AdSense and the AdSense API are marvelous products," he concludes. "They're ideal for our business model."
Google AdSense is a program enabling online businesses to earn revenue from serving ads precisely targeted to their site. Through AdSense, website publishers can also provide their visitors with site search and Google web search, earning revenue through Google ads on the search results pages. AdSense publishers are a part of the Google Network, which includes many of the Top 100 Media Metrix sites such as AOL, About.com, Amazon, Ask.com, and Lycos. For more information, visit https://www.google.com/adsense/.
The AdSense API is a free beta service that enables people to integrate Google AdSense into their website offerings. Using the AdSense API, website publishers can allow users to perform a variety of AdSense functions: create or manage their AdSense accounts, modify their AdSense ads and view ad performance and earnings reports. The AdSense API is ideal for developers whose users create their own web content through web hosting, web publishing, blogging, and social networking applications. For more information, visit http://code.google.com/apis/adsense/.
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