Google AdSense (the other side to AdWords) has something of a hit and miss deployment when it comes to Africa. While it would be an excellent method for African bloggers to get a bit of money to cover their internet expenses, Google doesn't offer payment options for any country in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is rather nasty on their part and hopefully over this next year, we'll start to see some momentum towards a better solution in that department.
By way of a test to see how clicks and more importantly, content, shapes up on a site that only has African content, we've deployed a small AdWords box to the home page of Maneno. This wasn't done to create some kind of massive monetizing scheme as we expect the overall payments from Google to be quite small. It was done purely as an experiment.
We want to see what happens when AdSense is confronted by the multiple language versions of Maneno. We want to see what happens when the Google servers see that you're coming from a different country outside those in North American and Europe. And most importantly we want to see what type of ads will be displayed.
The beauty of the AdWords system is that is displays ads based upon contextual relevance, which is a large part of the reason why it became so popular due to the ads being related to what users read on the page. Maneno authors write in a more balanced manner about Africa talking about a great breadth of topics that go beyond the doom and gloom angle. This is very much different from what is portrayed in traditional media outlets such as CNN and BBC. Because of this, will the AdWords be more like what you see in the US or say, France, or will we just see ads for charities about saving children, animal safaris, or voluntourism?
We're putting forth all these questions because we want to hear from everyone who views these ads and work to get a greater pictures of AdWords in Africa, since it is currently one of the most dominant ad delivery systems on the web. Please feel free to leave comments or contact us directly to share your thoughts.
And naturally, as these ads are a bit of a bandwidth hog at 25kb, if you set your bandwidth throttling to Very Slow, they won't display. We don't want this trial to be a bandwidth burden.
