chrisuk - 6:47 pm on Jan 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

No idea about the quality of the traffic or if that was the reason or something else entirely but its another example of how ppc affiliation for publishers is maturing into an ugly beast that you can no longer depend on for long term revenue be it from YSM, Google or whoever.

Thinkabout it - The Tier 1 ppcs spend the last 6 years+ pushing out their feeds to all sorts of sites. They tell you that making sites or applications just for ads is great and sure enough new companies spring up that do just this, for years everyone is happy.

Now there are more publishers, greater advertiser scrutiny, ad serving sites and agencies are everywhere, free inventory is at a premium and the PPC's suddenly decide the models they have promoted for half a decade are showing their age; the market saturated with the various guises of mfa. Granted the ad networks make and change the rules but they must also take severe responsibility for the markets they help shape and grow such as arbitrage.

Whatever your view, a big weakness with Adsense and increasingly feeds from other providers are the threat that they can cut you off at short notice or smartprice your revenue to death. The lesson to learn is be vary careful who you sign with and on what terms, those who pay better, may in fact end up costing you money in the longer term.

Consider also that accounts are often terminated or traffic discounted based on their analysis of your traffic quality, set against metrics you cannot see or respond to. Set against conversion bars that you also cannot see or react to. Talk about a shot in the dark.

Depending how it pans out here and the actual circumstances the worrying thing is that this is a large publisher getting kicked, not some 2cent clicker!. Those of you out there with big sites and big ppc monthly cheques should read into that what you will.