While I’m cautious about commercializing education, I think this is a good idea because it allows the community to get more involved in sponsoring education.  The idea could sour if the advertising becomes a distraction to the student while taking their test.

At BYU, they have a testing center which allows students to take their exams over a range of dates.  Often the last day the exam is offered is considered a late day in which a fee is charged.  The late fees help departments to offset the cost of the exam.  Perhaps the BYU testing center should offer exam advertising to as an alternative to late fees.

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A few months ago I suggested allowing projects hosted on Google code to display advertising in order to collect revenue and support their project. One of the problems I saw in this model was that it could encourage project forking just so individuals could collect advertising revenue.

While collecting advertising revenue might work with projects with just a single developer, full-community projects with multiple developers would make it difficult to decide how to divide up the money among many developers.

What I might suggest instead, is that projects hosted on Google Code can display advertising, but rather than collecting the revenue themselves, they can decide to donate the money a non-profit organization that supports open source software. Google can pre-approve and generate a list of these non-profits groups, such that the open source project can simply select their favorite organization to receive the profits.

This is a win for everyone. Google can increase (maybe only insignificantly) its advertising market share. The non-profit groups receive extra financing, allowing them to further open source software development. Developers don’t win anything directly other than satisfaction for helping a non-profit (although considering many open source developers write software purely for satisfaction, this is not a small bonus), but developers will benefit from the overall strengthening of the open-source community. Google can also win on its taxes by being able to write-off the financial donations to the non-profits.

Please, Google, consider Google Code advertising that can help provide financing for open-source non-profits.

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I find myself logging into the AdSense site frequently, just to see how much money I’ve made by publishing your advertisements. It would be very convenient if you would place much of the Overview information into a Google Gadget that I can have on my iGoogle page.

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Usually, when I create an ad, I put all the things positive about the product that I’m trying to sell. The thought was to do whatever it takes to get them to come to the site, because then they will buy.

This scheme may work with a cost per impression (CPI) payment rate for ads, where the advertiser pays for the number of times the ad appears, not how many times the ad is clicked on. Many advertising rates are listed as cost per click (CPC), meaning the advertiser pays for each person who clicks on the ad.

With CPC pricing, it may be advantageous to put something more real, such as cost, as part of the advertisement. This way, the consumer makes a little bit more information about purchasing the product before the click on the ad, and before the advertiser pays for that click.

While displaying price or other details as part of an ad may not increase the traffic to the site, it may increase the overall quality of the customer that does.

This may or may not work with some advertising services, such as Google Adwords. This service (and perhaps others) gives better performing ads better positions on sites. By displaying the price on the ad, this may decrease the click through ratio of the ad, and Google may not display the ad quite so previlently.

I haven’t actually tried any of this, but this is some of my current theory. I hope to try it in the upcoming months, and I’ll try to report back about how it goes.

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I still really like how Google will give me $1 for every person I can refer to Firefox with the Google Toolbar. Over the last year, through non-paying efforts I’ve referred about 50 people. Maybe I can keep that up. If you want to install Firefox with the Google Toolbar, and I highly recommend that you do, please click here.

So the 10 to 20 cents a day that I think I can consistantly make, I think I can increase this by increasing my content on my blog. So look forward to many more blogs messages on a wider variety of topics.

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