Besides better performance, statically generating web pages has certain advantages, not the least of which is the fact that one can design a directory structure that can be easily monitored with AdSense's URL Channels to determine the best performing pages, i.e. those that bring in the highest earnings.

I will start by pointing out that historically, Unix systems have been quite poor at handling very large flat directories. Unix file systems have traditionally implemented a linear search algorithm for looking up directory entries, resulting in unacceptably slow lookup times for flat directories with more than a few thousand files. I believe modern Unix file systems have addressed this issue in recent years, but one can never be sure of how old is the system the hosting company is running things on.

This performance issue can be addressed by splitting up each file name based on the first few letters. A file called "New-York-City.html" would be renamed to "N/e/New-York-City.html" or "N/e/w/New-York-City.html". This way, the lookup effort is drastically reduced.

While this strategy is of questionable value on modern file systems when it comes to performance, it has an interesting benefit in terms of monitoring AdSense earnings. Given the limited number of simultaneously active URL channels (200), organizing files in this fashion allows publishers to allocate an URL channel to each top-level letter or digit directory and monitor earnings and click-through rates for the pages located underneath. After determining the best performing top-level directories, some of the URL channels associated with poorly performing top-level directories can be deactivated and reassigned to the subdirectories of the best performing top-level directories. Monitoring the earnings of these intermediate level subdirectories for a while can help publishers drill down in the right direction and eventually determine, by assigning URL channels to individual pages, the exact set of photographs that are responsible for most of their earnings.

For example, let us say that the top-level directory generating the highest earnings is "T". After deactivating the channels associated with top-level directories "A", "D" and "J" (for not earning much), these and other available channels are assigned to subdirectories of "P". A week of monitoring later, it turns out that "P/a" and "P/r" bring in the highest earnings. Finally, assigning URL channels to each HTML page in those subdirectories reveals that "Paris.html" and "Prague.html" are the photographs earning the most advertising revenue. It should come as no surprise if it turns out that a very small set of photographs brings in a significant chunk of the revenue!

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