AdSense is the Google “feature” that serves up those Ads by Google at the bottom of each page here that some of you got so exercised about.
Umpty gazillion pages have them, though, and I put them on my blog. Even got paid once.
But for the past couple of days, the ads haven’t appeared, the ad reports don’t show, and now I can’t even get onto the AdSense site.
Apparently I’m not alone.
That site and the site that page links to are the only ones on Google, Google News or Google Blogs that seem to talk about this. Shouldn’t this be enormous news all over the net? Many of Google’s billions come from these ads. I mean, if *we’re * complaining this heavily about *small * outages…
For a couple of days, I was not able to view AdSense reports (but now they are fine). However, the ads have continuously been appearing on my site and blog with no apparent problem.
I’m not privy to the source of Google’s revenues, but I guess that this is somewhat exaggerating. Most of Google’s money comes from sponsored links which you get when you do a search with Google itself. The AdSense ads which they place on other people’s websites certainly make profits for them (if not, they wouldn’t do it), but I don’t think they are of an importance comparable to the one of the Google search engine.
Having these temporary outages is annoying, but it doesn’t threat the operability of the Google empire, let alone of the internet as a whole in a way similar to the outages of the optical fibers serving Asia a few weeks ago.
Google makes around $20 billion a year in revenue. Even a small fraction of that is many billions, which is why I phrased it that way.
Everything is working this morning, for the first time in two days. I still received ad clicks, though, so other people apparently could still see the ads.
I’m still surprised that a major system-wide glitch in Google didn’t receive greater attention.