You may be in breach of Google’s new Adsense terms and conditions – but their principal revenue model may also contravene your content license.

Matt Haughey looks at how to make money form a weblog by focusing on one thing and using Google's Adsense.

But Google itself makes money from text ads based upon this content. Following Matt's argument, the best model for a weblog search engine or aggregator is Adsense - aggregate weblogs into specific focused categories or search returns and run Adsense along the side. If more focused content drives more Adsense revenue, then let the aggregator create that focus through topics.

But there is a problem with this. If you aggregate from sites that are funded by Adsense then you are, in effect, ripping them off by making revenue from other people's content and denying them their principal revenue in return. Tough luck perhaps, but in actual fact many weblogs including Matt's PVR blog explicitly prohibit using the content for commercial purposes, via a suitable Creative Commons license.

If your site is funded by Adsense and has a 'no commercial use' creative commons license, then any search engine or aggregator that in turn uses text ads based upon search returns or aggregated topics, is making money out of your content in exactly the same way that you do, but with less effort.

One solution to this would be a revenue share on ads served against your content (and this requires ads at the individual post level). This isn't going to happen on standard search engines, however weblogs have one valuable asset that gives leverage - ping server notification.

Ping servers allow real-time search of weblogs unlike the 15 minutes or older returns for most search engines. Perhaps bloggers should only allow access to ping information, if there is revenue split on text ads served against their content?

Revenue-split advertising models may sound too complicated to play out in the real world, but if content providers and search engines both make their money out of contextual ads, or content providers allow repurposing and syndication by serving up full-text RSS content, without branding or ads, then this will be inevitable, in order to avoid the circular mess of when both parties serve up ads e.g. in RSS feeds themseves as well as in searches accross RSS feeds.

I predict that within two years most business weblogs will be based on 'Adsense-like' advertising revenue and that weblog aggregators and search engines that offer searches accross content as soon as it is posted will split revenues on ad clicks between the publisher and the aggregator.