Google AdSense is an advertising program that was launched in the middle of 2003 by Google, the popular search engine. Google acts as an intermediary between a vast number of advertisers and an equally impressive number of website owners.

Advertisers sign up with Google and create text ads that they would like to be displayed. Google displays these ads on the results pages of searches that people conduct from Google.com. The Google AdSense program allows these advertisements to show up on pages all over the internet. To see some of the ads themselves, take a look at the sidebar on this page. The webmaster simply places a special code in their page and Google AdSense takes care of the rest. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the system is that robots (specialized computer programs that scan internet pages) analyzes pages that ads will be placed on to determine which ads are most relevant to the page's content.

The relevancy of ads placed by AdSense varies on all sorts of criteria, but most ads are usually very relevant to the page on which the ad is displayed. For example, the ads on this page should be related to the internet, advertising, and/or the Google AdSense program itself.

Advertisers pay Google a certain amount for each time one of their ads are clicked. Google keeps a portion of this payment and passes on the rest to the owner of the website itself. Page views of the advertisements are irrelevant in terms of generating revenue in the program - commissions are only generated when internet users actually click on the ads themselves.

Google AdSense checks are sent out on a monthly basis. Many webmasters wait in anticipation of their checks since AdSense provides them a simple way to recoup some of the losses associated with posting websites on the internet. In some cases, webmasters can even make a profit using Google AdSense.