A top Google official said that growing abuse of the company's lucrative pay-per-click advertising model threatens the popular Internet search engine's business."I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model," Google chief financial officer George Reyes said at a conference Wednesday.
My only concern is that, as google finds more advertisers, they will consider themselves in a better financial position to...begin phasing adsense out. Think about it: if they manage to more than double their advertisers, they won't need the 25% of revenue that adsense currently contributes to their PPC earnings. Sometimes, a company will decide to take a short-term hit if it means ensuring future growth or eliminating a line of business that is too risky or has too many problems.
There are already many smaller players who are selling a similar product to Adsense. Should google ever cancel Adsense, there will be a dozen other companies competing for it.
Also, there is no way Google is going to maintain an 80% market share of search. As they lose some of this share they will actually depend even more on their content network.
I would think so. Ad campaigns that are run on high-quality sites would combat the fraud issue and also likely result in higher conversions, giving advertisers a greater ROI both ways. However, I suspect that many advertisers are not fast enough on the uptake (call me cynical) to figure this out . So, many might opt for the "golly, a discount!" option initially. And that, in effect, would translate into a pay cut for many publishers.
And the effort required to differentiate high quality versus lower quality sites would be considerable. It might also tend to be very problematic if they (google) don't develop solid, yet flexible (considering how many different types of industries and site-approaches there are) criteria for doing this. I've done subjective analysis before and if you don't have the criteria down pat, it can be vexing. Course, it would be simple to just have categories such as "Very good", "good", "fair", "crap", and "cancel account".
However, I suspect that many advertisers are not fast enough on the uptake (call me cynical) to figure this out . So, many might opt for the "golly, a discount!" option initially. And that, in effect, would translate into a pay cut for many publishers.
Sure, if you're talking about traditional PPC advertisers (e.g., e-commerce vendors and affiliate sites). But the real growth potential for AdSense is among mainstream advertisers and advertising agencies who are used to purchasing media selectively--whether to reach certain demographics (THE NEW YORKER, for example) or special-interest audiences (POP PHOTO, STEREOPHILE, EDITOR AND PUBLISHER). Those advertisers aren't looking to save a nickel or a quarter per click at the expense of targeted readers; they're interested in high-quality leads.
