There are a couple of webmaster forums that do revenue sharing with Google AdSense. For example, if you have a Google AdSense account (for your own website), you can plug your account number into your profile. Then, whenever someone views a thread, part of the time it will be the account number of the thread starter, part of the time it will be the account number of a random poster in the thread, and part of the time it will be the forum owner's account number ... hooked up to the Google AdSense seen on the thread.

Of course, this really only works with webmaster forums. Additionally, I'm pretty sure it violates Google's terms of service, but I'm not 100% on that.

I was wondering about the same thing. I doubt that Google allows that. Yet, this "feature" is advertised on some of the webmaster forums that I have visited.
Google must be aware of this and yet it did not take any action against those who use this practice.

Yeah, but I wouldn't risk it.

yeah i think google allows this kind of sharing because theres tons of website that are offering revenue sharing.

I'm about to implement this on one of my forums. I'm looking at Google's terms and I cannot find anything that would prohibit this. Can you explain how it violates the TOS? I don't want to get in trouble.

Hmm. To be honest, I'm not sure how Google would even be able to detect revenue sharing. The ad that appears on the page uses Google's JavaScript code exactly as Google specifies. Doing revenue sharing doesn't involve breaking Google's code, nor does it involve any trickery. The ad on the page is plain JavaScript with an AdSense ID, like any other ad.

Of course, I've been wrong about Google before, which is why I ask.

-Tony

Not only that, it promotes quality discussion, because the people participating don't want to drive away members. Suddenly, the top posters start to view your site the way you view it. They want to provoke discussion without provoking flame wars or anything that jeopardizes the number of viewers.

Fairly easy with phpBB. Grab the phpBB mod, Custom Profile Fields. Add 2 custom fields to the profile -- 1 for the AdSense ID, and 1 for the Campaign ID. VBulletin can do custom fields built-in, so that should be easy.

Next, the only difficult step. You query the database when a topic is viewed. You get the IDs for the person who started the topic. Then, using PHP's echo statements (or print, whatever your system uses), you write out the Google AdSense JavaScript code, plugging in the IDs of the topic starter. The page is sent to the person's browser, the JavaScript is run as usual, and Google serves an ad for that ID. If someone clicks an ad, Google credits it to that ID, not yours.

After that, you can get pretty fancy. You can plug in your own values if the person who started the topic never entered an ID. You can do yours 50% of the time, and theirs 50% of the time. You can do it randomly, based upon anyone who posted in the topic. You could tie it to their reputation or karma. Lots of ways to do it.

-Tony

And the best example of this is Digital Point Forums. They have been doing soon for years now.

Does anybody know a working hack for vBulletin 3.5.x?

oh yea just put my adsense code in digitalpoint forum god my daily revenue from DP is around $7 this works

I think its a great too to increase forum activity.