Omid Kordestani should know that AdSense fails Unicode (utf-8)

Finally got approved by AdSense guys and put a banner in my Persian and English blog. It hasn't been that bad. I made $5 yesterday and maybe the same today.

But the thing is that blogs are not valuable keywords in terms of Google marketability, so are anything related to Iran, Persians etc. Part of it is because Internet in Iran is still very very young. There are only about 3 million Internet users out of the 75 million population.

The other big reason which could be even more important the latter, is that, believe it or not, there is no major or minor international credit card company operation in Iran. So even if you are a rich, upper-class Tehranian and you want to buy, say, a T-shirt online, you simply have to forget it. Unless you have a friend or relative who has a credit card since he travels a lot.

So when your content is based in a big but virtually poor market, 4 bucks a day is kind of amazing. However I should start to think about some new ideas for niche blogs. Let's see what I can come up with.

By the way, Google AdSense seems to have problems displaying ut-8 characters in the ads. They all become question marks. I hope Omid Kordestani, the Iranian VP of Google, reads this and let the engineers know about it.