12/03/2007

Google AdSense and Silverlight

I was thinking about Rich Internet Applications (RIA) written in Silverlight. Think about a page with a title and big nice Silverlight control. Think about whole of Outlook implemented as a Silverlight control. It would be a great applciation, wouldn't it? Now as an author of such applciation, I would definitely want to get paid. I could charge for use, or I could use advsrtising.

AdSense is Google's adverstising revenue sharing programme. I have no experience with it. To try it first hand I included AdSense module to this blog. But right now as I write this, I rely more of what I read then personal experience.
What I understand is that google's bot (Metabot) would connect to my pages, analyze its content and then decide what ads to show. It can work great for blogs. It can work nice for average web pages based on HTML or even DHTML. It completely eludes me how will such bot peek into what is happening inside Silverlight control of mine.

Worse thing could happen. Bad guys try to defraud advertisers creating all kind of expoits. They reportedly create automatic clicking systems, or pages consisting entirely of ads etc. Google have to fight back. They also have to automate their decisions. So once i have this empty page with SIlverlight control, I have no idea if Google would not decide it is some kind of new exploit, and ban me for life.

So, what do I do?

Google Adsense help forum seems to have an answer.And the answer seems to be yes. But I am not convinced. I could believe they search XAML file. But what if I generate Silverlight elements programmatically? In my Outlook knockoff application, I'd bring the email and calendar items via JSON calls - how would their bot know that?

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