Undead_Hunter - 9:52 pm on Mar 9, 2005 (gmt 0)

About vetting sites and the scraper sites, and about letting advertisers pick the sites they are on...

How do we *know* that every one of those scraper sites aren't converting to sales?

We can guess all we want, but unless you can track conversion statistics, none of us have any idea how they do. Sure, I find them junk, and I doubt they work. But we don't really know for sure without statistics.

Anyway, I'm not worried about those because my guess is that SmartPricing takes care of the worst of them - how many people complaining about their CPM dropping rapidly over time have this kind of website? None of us know for sure.

As for letting advertisers choose - they have *no idea* whether your site or my site converts to sales better or not. Most of the affiliates I know have a "sample site" that they apply for to affiliate programs, and then they never, ever run them on that site.

No, if I was at Yahoo, I would offer not just the same program as Google, but I would add a few extra features to rip away market share from Google! Even if it costs me in the short-term, I can always toss out the sites that don't perform well in the long-term. I think they'd be making a BIG mistake to stick with only "premium" publishers, those over X amount of page views.

And as EuropeForVisitors said over on another thread - "AdSense is a market of niches" - so again, having publishers over a certain page view limit could work against this long term.