Release of Google AdSense

Google AdSense is an advertising programme launched by Google in 2003, which lets website owners display text and, later, image and video advertisements chosen to match the content of their pages and earn a share of the revenue. Its technology came partly from Applied Semantics, a company that Google acquired in April 2003 and that had developed ways to analyse the meaning of web text. AdSense gave small publishers, bloggers and online media a way to make money from traffic, helped build the economy of the ad-supported web and became a major source of income for Google. It has also raised questions about click fraud, privacy and the effect of advertising on the quality of content.

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