Drupal Adsense Module Gets Revenue Sharing Feature

The Drupal  Adsense module has been updated to allow revenue sharing.

Some technical details for the curious:

• The site admin can assign a certain percentage of ad views to be assigned to  the node author's Google AdSense client ID.
• The node  types are also configurable, so the admin can only enable it for specific node types (e.g. blogs).
• The revenue sharing only  applies to the full node view, not the teasers. These go to "the house" (i.e. the site assigned Adsense client  ID).
• The path /blog/uid also has revenue sharing enabled.
• A specifically named profile field has to be filled in by the user to get credited with the ads.
• When revenue sharing is enabled, adsense caching is disabled.
• The percentage is determined based on a random number generator. So it is basically tossing dice from 1 to 100, and seeing if this page view should be awarded to the author or the site. I did this so that I dont have to keep a running total in the database, which would slow things down.

Benefits

This is a great community building tool.

Ad revenue sharing allows your site to grow by giving an incentive for users to participate and write articles on your site. This in turn will increase traffic to the site, and hence attract more writers. 

Future Directions

In the future, I can make a version that makes the percentage variable based on which role the user is assigned to. This allows premium users (e.g. paying  subscribers, moderators, ...etc.) to get a higher percentage of the revenue.

The ad sharing feature is now available for the 4.6 version only at the moment. If someone is willing to sponsor ad sharing for 4.7, please contact me.

Endless Possibilities

This revenue sharing really opens a lot of possibilities.

For example,  when used in conjunction the commercial version of the User Points module, the role based ad sharing mentioned above can be more of an incentive for people to write on your web site. They gain points by writing, commenting, voting, ...etc. The more points they gain, the higher roles they get, and hence the higher percentage of ad revenue they get.