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Timing - Publishers were faced with declining CPC (Cost Per Click) rates as a result of the dot-com burst. Fact is, while traditional content providers were moving towards CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) ads, Google remained steady with it's CPC and continued to pay one of the highest rates in the industry.

Quality At the time Google Adsense came out, "good enough" was the standard. Unfortunately, publishers were faced with declining revenues not simply because advertisers were paying less but as a result, advertisers were seeing fewer results. Traditional banners were still the norm and while click rates were declining from their all time high of 5%, Google quickly found that by providing very targeted ads, they could increase overall click rates. The bet eventually paid off, as AdWords has one of the highest click rates in the industry, even to the point where most ad networks have moved away from traditional banner ads into high click rate text ads.

Secrecy While traditional ad networks exposed their rates to advertising, allowing for higher click fraud rates targeted at high revenue ads, Google to this day does not provide CPC rates or advertiser rates. While most publishers can have a pretty good guess, Google leaves this bit of information in the dark as to be able to continuously target ads when needed and ensure that publishers do not hit the highest paying ads most.

Click Fraud While some would say Google is doing everything they can, fact is, that is far from the truth. Technology exist today to prevent near 100% of all click fraud but the reality is that in order to do this, you will have to sacrifice many valid clicks to. In fact, it wasn't till recently that Google stopped charging advertisers for double clicks and thereby taking a hit to it's bottom line and the revenue of publishers. By maintaining somewhat of a lazed policy on click fraud, Google ensures that publishers receive a higher than expected revenue stream.

Payments Above all else, the one thing that made this program successful is they paid and they paid on time. During the early part of the decade, there were thousands upon thousands of programs online which offered what appeared to be great ad programs but the fact of the matter is they were weeks or even months later, many in fact just never paid at all. Google has consistently ensured that publishers were paid and paid on time, without short of a few days delay here and that. This strategy has ensured that publishers could rely on the program, making it one of the most attractive programs on the net.