Need More Channels

[TrustNo1]

20 was a nice start, but hopefully unlimited in the future.

[Fiver]

Keep in mind they are rotatable. You can have as many as you want, but you can only have 20 active at one time.

[DingoNY]

Not to knock Google....

But 20 channels are ridiculous. And so is waiting 2 days for channel data... And the delayed (non-real time) updates.

Ok I know that sounds harsh - and I'm not trying to be mean - but well, I'll tell you something a friend of mine recently said about an app which was developped internally at work.

He was complaining to the developpers that it takes 4 minutes to search some ungodly small amount of data... Like a 2MB database or something. The developper responded with the REASON it was slow and not saying what could be done to fix it.

My friends reply was that Google indexes billions of sites - and terabytes of data. And it will search that data in under one second.

With such talent and infrastructure - which truly impresses the hell out of me... I don't quite understand why people are limitted to 20 channels, that take 2 days to update.

Actually I don't want the reason - I'd just like them to fix it :) To be honest I don't need 20 channels - I just find it wrong that one of the worlds best "software" companies has these limitations. (I'll admit "real-time" updates would be a stretch - so I'm not really even talking about that one)

Still love Adsense though :)

[Need3lives]

Agree - channels are great, but more channels would be even better. I could see easily making use of 200+, so unlimited seems like the way to go. Heck, even if I had to pay $50 a month back to Google to pay for the right of having unlimited channels, it would be worth it.

[richmondsteve]

I'm sure the current limitations are by design and are not due to technical hurdles.

[DingoNY]

> I'm sure the current limitations are by design and are not due to technical hurdles.

And my analogy at work was poor design of a database that had horrible searching performance.

The engineers behind these products are incredibly smart. While I realize I do not know the details behind the design - from the surface it suffers from some limitations.

Again - if they can make systems that search terabytes in under a second... Why am I waiting 2 days to find out what channel someone clicked on?

It strikes me as being kind of silly in that context :)

[richmondsteve]

DingoNY wrote:

Again - if they can make systems that search terabytes in under a second... Why am I waiting 2 days to find out what channel someone clicked on?

As I said before, I'm sure this is by design. This has been discussed here a number of times since channels were launched. Actually, the topic of report lag times and lack of detail has been discussed going back to when I started participating in this forum after I joined AdSense as a publisher last June.

As a publisher I'd prefer to know what ad resulted in a click, how much it was worth and what page it appeared on in near real-time, but I don't believe that's in the best interests of Google, the advertisers or site visitors. I suspect that Google limits publishers to 20 channels and has incorporated a time lag into channel and aggregate stats because they're of the same opinion. It's not a matter of whether Google could give us better reports and give us the data faster, it's a matter of whether they want to.

[thayer]

Which raises the question of why doesn't Google say something like "technically we could do that but we have chosen not to for reasons which we prefer not to discuss" (or in some instances perhaps they could give a clue or state why). I think many of us would prefer that statement and it would probably reduce some of the negativity going Google's way from folks here. But they seem to like major amounts of secrecy, so I guess they will keep on with the way they are doing it.

[HarleyGuy]

Just a thought
If channels were updated in real time publishers would be checking them constantly and would over-run g's severs.
My first couple of months in the program I would check my earning 10 times a day. And that was with simple stats that G had at the time.
With a more advanced system now that includes channels, if everyone were to check thier channels 10 times a day there would be system overload.
And that would be with just 20 channels. Could you imagine if there were unlimited channels.

[valley]

With a more advanced system now that includes channels, if everyone were to check thier channels 10 times a day there would be system overload.

No,it can work no problem, does yahoo mail ever overload?.
I cannot see system overload to be the problem, the reason is far more complex and deep than that.

[ChrisKud5]

What is the constant talk about "server overload"? Is this a joke? Are you people who use this phrase as often as your wifes name serious? If you think publishers checking stats or screwing with channels is going to "overload the server", you have some reading to do.

If google can index the entire internet and update it constantly, i have a feeling that 10 million people checking stats all day every day wont phase any of googles technology.

[dvduval]

I just wrote my own Adsense tracker script, so that I could track clicks (and personally watch for fraudulent clicks so I can be proactive in preventing them). Using such a script you can easily get information abou the clicks on all of your sites (regardless of whether you have used up your channels). The only thing you can't determine is the EPC, but you can at least use the channels for the sites with the highest earnings.