AdSense is an easy program to grasp: it's a great form of an advertising bringing a lot of benefits to every person in the chain. And of course, seeing the results it can have on a business (and a publisher) people encourage this form of publicity.
For the browsing audience this is probably the most straightforward model available, because they can be directed to a lot of new sites they wouldn't have otherwise found. Needless to say, if you have an AdSense banner on your site, and a large number of visitors you'll know it offers a great financial benefit.
But why does it work for the people clicking the links, as opposed to a standard approach?
It is aided by today's society. With bloggers and information based articles on the internet, people may be encouraged to complete purchases, which adsense can provide links to relevant suppliers whilst also benefiting the publisher.
And the good thing about this is that it works for site visitors as well. In fact Google realized that by pleasing the people who are looking for something, and directing them to what they need faster, everybody wins.
It is because of this that a lot of websites promote through AdSense in both content and search. They do it because they ultimately learned that it works for everyone.
If we look in the past, we can realize that this kind of publicity has a great impact over the people, especially in the last few years. When we enter on a web site and we see a graphical banner, our first idea is to cancel it out of our mind, because it's of no concern to us.
That's why traditional banner advertising is wrong. It's precisely because people are becoming savvy that they don’t look at a flashy banner because they think they'll be losing their time with it.
We've gotten accustomed to banners that don't interest us. And we're accustomed to them having nice graphics. So we naturally associate the two things and think that a banner with nice graphics has nothing to tell us.
But we might look at a text-ad because we've grown accustomed to them being targeted at what we're looking for. Basically these advertisements have marketed themselves into being looked at by any visitor.
This is a typical "no fluff, just stuff" situation. And in the end it means the visitors will see what they're interested in, not some random cool graphics you throw at them.
As stated above, site visitors adopt this advertising mechanism, because it is efficient in leading them to pages of interest and can offer ton of things they really want to see. Someone coming across an article on adsense was probably looking for shoes or doing research on shoes when they came across the article.
And most importantly for everyone, including visitors, this scheme can only improve as the process gets further refined to make ads more relevant to what you're looking for, not just a couple of keywords on a site.
Nowadays, it is because of AdSense that Internet surfers are looking after more interesting related things from banners, and the companies behind the site (Google and the advertiser) need to have better ideas to display, as expectations have increased a great deal.
So could "Do no evil" actually work in today's cut throat competitive marketplace? Well, as you can see it can and it does. And you, as a visitor are the one who gets to enjoy this the most. Advertising becomes less of a burden and more of a benefit, and is still a benefit you can choose to ignore.
Less obtrusive banners; banners that you're actually likely to be interested in and click means you'll be less annoyed by surfing the web and feel like you as a visitor being offered a relevant service.
Although some may feel reluctant to read articles that are there purely to compel consumers, undoubtedly without this consideration they are useful. Ultimately the adverts mean that you don’t have to go back to your homepage every time you are compelled to complete a purchase.