Ever since I first put up the MeSH-based medical thesaurus on the site last Spring, I’ve been wanting to add AdSense to it to monetize the traffic. Now that we have a new site design I figured I’d take the time to update it. (Yes, getting the 160,000+ pages of MeSH done is easier than the 150 pages of regular content that desperately needs to be updated). Here’s how it looks:

Which is pretty much what you’d expect given that you’re looking at the blog which has also had the new look and feel implemented.

We’re now watching how AdSense does. At first I was thinking we might not make much money - and I still think it won’t make much, but I’m not thinking it will make more than I thought it might. Our second click yesterday was for over $1.50, which is obviously excellent… But our click thru rate (CTR - the number of visitors who actually click on an ad) is pretty low, and given that a medical thesaurus is pretty long tail to start with, there isn’t that much traffic in the first place. Still, it’s an interesting experiment.

There are a number of things I want to accomplish still with the medical thesaurus - so there will be another version coming in the not-too-distant future… Here’s some of the items that will be included in that version:

• I didn’t manage to think ahead and implement the ability to track AdSense clicks as a goal in Google Analytics. So that will go into the next version.
• The next version will be based on MeSH 2008, rather than MeSH 2007 and I’ll also use the supplementary data which will give a lot more information on each page about related chemical compounds.
• I’ll try my hand at a mobile version and put AdSense on that as well. Not expecting huge results, but once again, a good exercise to learn from.

Now we just have to get the core of this site redesigned with the new look and feel…

Tags: MeSH
Categories: AdSense, Content Development