I understand that, in the past, a number of people made a lot of money with Google adsense with the following technique. They'd build numerous sites and pages around niche keywords, with no content of any value or even gibberish. Well, by definition, a niche market wants niche desitnations in the hopes of finding niche, specialized interest content, which is sometimes hard to find.

Adsense links were visible and featured on the sites (in accordance with Google recommendations). As it turns out, sites with little or no good content achieved a higher click-thru rate on the Adsense links than sites that had good content. It makes sense. On the bad sites, the Adsense links represented something of value to the niche visitor seeking something related to his or her interest. On the good site, who wants to click to elsewhere via Adsense links? You want to stay there with the good content.

Eventually, citing "quality" issues, Google started closing the accounts of people who presented Adsense links on such pages. I wouldn't know if the advertisers were getting value for their Adwords (these Adsense links) or not, but I assume that Google would know.

Of course, it's nicer for the site visitors, i.e., web users. It's nice to have less junk on the web. Imagine someday if you entered a term in a search engine and the top 10 links on the search page actually had information you were looking for (if you were looking for information) rather than useless or meaningless content, or an endless chain of links from directories, search engines and social bookmarks leading to more directories, search engines and social bookmarks. Back in the Internet bubble heydays they said that "information about information" was more valuable than information. I guess that turned out to be so true it's led to a bubble of sites that are only information about information about information about information.... if you know what I mean - until there's nothing there but time gobbling gibberish based on a keyword - and of course, context-based adsense links. It reminds me of a rare occurance, that time when a fantasy (or a lie) became a rumor, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But, I digress.

Well, the alternative for folks wanting to be in some kind of internet publishing business, earning revenue for advertising is to offer genuine content of some sort. And best of all, offer content that "ALOP" (A Lot Of Other People) creates.

I know of a couple of examples of article and video sites that allow "ALOP" to participate, both in the generation of content of value and in the adsense earnings. It makes sense. In some ways, it's consistent with and helps fulfill the "many-to-many" publishing promises that first appeared with the web.

I mean, we were for so many years completely accustomed to the one-to- one (e.g. telephone and letter) and one-to-many (newspaper, radio, TV, magazines, albums, books, theaters, movies) models of communicating and publishing. But the internet would inherently be a "many-to-many" medium, where many people broadcast many messages (or info or entertainment or whatever) to many people (many times.) I guess that makes it like a very long cocktail party.

So, if you're looking for information, education, entertainment, or yes, even products, this new model (sometimes called "article sharing") may end up offering a lot of value to the internet audience, as well as to the entrepreneurs. While it might not be better than a video of my little dog chasing her tail, or my neighbor's teenager launching a Coke and Mentos missle, it's a lot better than gibberish and represents a step forward!