Why Do You Need a Website for Google Adsense?

How AdSense Works

One way to think of Google AdSense is as a 'middle man' in online advertising. Webmasters and businesses wishing to advertise products and services sign up with AdSense, which assigns ads to places on websites based on the relevance of their content to the topic area the webmaster specifies for his site when signing up. In other words, webmasters never come into direct contact with business owners. To facilitate ad placement, it's necessary for the webmaster to install a Google-generate code within the HTML of his website.

Signup Process

Signing up for AdSense is free and a process that takes only a few minutes -- even less if you already have a Google account. After providing contact details, as well as the URL and category of your website, you're taken to a page where you can select how you want ads formatted on your site, including their size, shape and color. Once you've chosen this, Google gives you a code you must paste into your site's 'index.html' file exactly as it appears on AdSense. If you don't own your own website, your means for inserting this code -- and thus participating in AdSense -- are limited.

Blogs

In some instances, you may be able to use AdSense, even if you don't own a domain name. For example, free blog hosts such as WordPress include 'plug-ins' that allow you to link with Google AdSense, copying the ad code into the plug-in applet instead of into HTML files to which you may or may not have access. Check your blog client's support page to see if it's possible to use AdSense, even without your own domain.

AdSense Logic

If you don't own your own domain and have access to its HTML files -- or blog using an AdSense-compatible platform -- you won't be able to generate revenue from AdSense using your website. Beyond the obvious technical limitations that prevent you from doing so, you must consider that for free websites, your provider alone bears the cost of hosting and operating your website, which can actually increase the more users access your site. It makes sense that you shouldn't be able to generate revenue if you don't pay anything to begin with.