About:Ad Revenue Sharing

Introduction

If you contribute to the Travellerspoint travel guide, or have photos or a blog on Travellerspoint, you can earn money by signing up to Google's AdSense Program and entering your Publisher ID on Travellerspoint.

At a glance, here are the three ways you can earn money:

• Contribute to the Travel Guide: If you write or edit articles in the wiki travel guide, we will display Google ads with your Publisher ID a percentage of the time (depending on how much you contributed), so that you earn money from any clicks those ads receive. If you contribute more than 15% to any given guide, you are also listed as a top contributor with a photo and link of your choosing. More information on promoting your site/blog.
• Start a blog: Start a blog on Travellerspoint and we'll show ads with your Publisher ID 100% of the time (unless you're co-authoring the blog with another member).
• Upload photos: If any of your photos are featured, the galleries in which they appear will show ads with your Publisher ID a percentage of the time (depending on how many of the photos in the gallery are yours).

As of April 1, 2009, you can also opt to contribute your Adsense earnings towards the Travellerspoint Foundation, which is using all the money for loans to Kiva entrepreneurs. To find out more about this excellent initiative, visit the Travellerspoint Foundation blog.

How it Works

In the right hand margin of each Travellerspoint Guide article, a couple of Google Ads are displayed (you should see some to the right of this article). These ads earn a small amount for each click they receive. The amount varies depending on how many advertisers are competing for those spots.

We are opening up these ads, ads on users' blogs and ads in the featured photo galleries to the members of Travellerspoint.

Only users who are Full Members are currently able to take advantage of this revenue-sharing option. If you're not a Full Member, don't be too worried - contributing a good dose of content to the guide will earn you the Full Member status in no time. Contributions elsewhere on the site (forums, blogs, photo gallery) are also taken into account when calculating member titles, so the more active you are, the quicker you will achieve Full Membership.

Warning: Do not click on ads on pages that you have contributed to. Google AdSense has ways of knowing when people are clicking on their own ads, and they will disable your account if you do so. Unfortunately, there's nothing Travellerspoint can do about this.

Travel Guide Ads

If you have contributed to an article, we calculate roughly what percentage of the content is due to your work and what percentage is due to other authors' work. If content you have contributed has been removed since you added it, you won't receive any credit. If you have contributed at least 1%, then we will show your ad 1% of the time. If you have contributed 50% of the content, then we will show your ad 50% of the time. If you are the only person to have contributed to the article, then your ad will be shown 100% of the time!

Blog Ads

Ads are shown on users' blogs in a couple of places. The most prominent is in the right hand navigation. Ads are also shown on individual entries underneath the entry.

Because blogs can have multiple authors, the ads shown aren't necessarily credited to the user who started the blog.

On individual entry's pages, the ad's are credited to the user who wrote the entry. On all other pages, the user who started the blog gets the credit. If you are contributing to a group blog, it is therefore important that the blog owner is the one with the Adsense account!

Photo Gallery Ads

Ads are shown in the gallery on featured content pages. No ads are shown on pages with un-featured photos. If you have had some photos featured, then you will find that your ads are occasionally displayed on the pages where your photos appear. The choice of which user's ads are shown is somewhat random, but it is more likely to show if more of the photos are yours. So if there are 25 photos on the page and 5 of them are yours, then you have a 20% chance that one of your ads will be displayed. If you have taken all the photos, then your ad should show 100% of the time.

The ad where user ads are displayed is the one that is displayed under the navigation controls for that gallery (not the one shown in the main left hand navigation)

Signing up for AdSense

To sign up for AdSense, visit the AdSense site and sign up for an account. Google will need to approve your AdSense account, which usually is done within a day or two.

Note: in the first field on the application form, it will ask for the "Website URL".

You can try entering www.travellerspoint.com. If that doesn't work, then it may be necessary to enter a different domain that you own yourself. If you don't have your own domain, you could also try creating a blogspot blog and using that domain. Those domains are treated differently because blogspot is owned by Google. Once you have the Adsense ID you should be able to use it on Travellerspoint. This process used to be easier, but Google has changed their signup process unfortunately.

Your AdSense Publisher ID

Once they have approved your account, you need to find out what your AdSense Publisher ID is. To do this log in to AdSense and click on the My Account tab. At the bottom of the page, they list the Property Information. Several unique IDs are provided there for you to look at. All these IDs share a common numeric portion. This is the part we are interested in.

The AdSense Publisher ID is highlighted

Adding your ID to Travellerspoint

Copy the numeric part of your AdSense Publisher ID and paste it into your Travellerspoint profile.

Note: this will only be possible if you are a Full Member (see above for details)

How much can I expect to earn?

How much you are able to earn is primarily dependent on two things

• How much you have contributed. The more you contribute, the more times your ads will be shown and the more chances people will have to click on them.
• How much traffic the page is getting. If people can't find the article you have helped write, then there is little chance they will ever click on an ad. Try to ensure that there are plenty of links pointing to the article (from other wiki articles for instance) to drive traffic.

We don't expect this to be a major income source for anyone any time soon. But the income will continue indefinitely, which over the long run could add up to something worthwhile and could certainly pay for a few cold beers after a hard day's travelling.

Warning: Do not click on ads on pages that you have contributed to. Google AdSense has ways of knowing when people are clicking on their own ads, and they will disable your account if you do so. Unfortunately, there's nothing Travellerspoint can do about this.

Maximise your ad revenue

Check out this article for tips on getting the most out of this program: Maximising Ad Revenue.