Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I was blocking so many MFA sites yesterday. Some of them were ridiculous. Just one paragraph text and 3 ad units.
I am curious to find out how much money these people make. I'm sure they are making some profit, otherwise why would so many MFA sites keep coming up.
Here is what I am planning to do. Buy a domain name and have a one html page with some text and 3 ad units.
Then I'll advertise that page through adwords and pay around say 2 cents a click. In one day I should be able to find out how much I spent on adwords and how much I made through Adsense.
My only concern is - By doing this will I jeopardize my current good standing with AS because I'll be using my existing AS code to display on that site. In other words am I doing anything against TOS.
Thanks
Sarah
On those numbers - $4 for 220 visitors, sounds like you paid $0.018 per click to get someone in to your experiment?$4 divided by 220 makes 1,8 cent a click.
or i finished school without maths?
1.8 cents is $0.018.
C'mon, EFV .. be fair .. and honest. It was Google's time (as I read the post), not Saraah's. If you extrapolate for a month ..
24 * 30 * 1.17 = $842.40
Not bad if it can be sustained .. $800/mo for a 1 page site.
Um .. I'll take 100 of them, please!
C'mon, EFV .. be fair .. and honest. It was Google's time (as I read the post), not Saraah's
I don't see how her model would be sustainable without a continuing investment of time in AdWords/AdWords bidding.
Or how about BVATs? (Blatant Violators of Adsense TOS). Or ADEs (Adsense Dead Ends)?
To be perfectly honest, Adsense is the reason that many of my pages exist. Yes, the pages are helpful (I hope), they add value (I think), and they're certainly TOS compliant. But my motivation for creating them was Adsense.
I think maybe "Made for Adsense" is a bit too vague (and ever-so-slightly disingenuous) a term for those blatant violators of Adsense' TOS.
But, with all the problems of quality scores on landing page going on, I just can't bring myself to believing that you can spend .018 per click.
kz
But we all know the difference between providing a service and gaming the system. Arbitrage provides a service to the marketplace by removing the slack (entirely at the risk of the arbitrageur).
But like I said earlier arbitrage is hard work and you can get skinned alive just as easily as make a killing if you don't put in the time.
Currency arbitrage is exciting, you get to follow world events on a very large stage but keyword arbitrage is all the drudgery and risk without the big payoff and there's only one marketplace totally controlled by one very tight-lipped company. Get a job Sarah.
Arbitrage provides a service to the marketplace
Not to imply any moral judgment, of course. I'm just saying. :-)
well actually NO - I havent been making any MFA sites crazily. I even pulled down that one page site I had up. I did'nt want to mess up my good standing with AS. Although I'm tempted to keep that site up for a week or so and see how the earnings are?
Infact I dont even think the site that I put up was against TOS. Agreed it was an MFA site - so what? To my defense it had good content.
I had about 4 product descriptions that I used - wrote my personal opinion about what I felt about those products, the advantages and disadvantages of each and why I preferred one over the other and put Ads on the page. The ads were prominently displayed and were not mixed with the content to get accidental clicks.
I dont think it violates any TOS. Just because I made a one page site to show AS, doesnt mean i'm doing something wrong. It did'nt have any other links cos its just a one page site :)
Why am i even feeling guilty ;) . Maybe I should put the site back up...or maybe i should go and read the TOS more carefully.....hehe
--Sarah
I thought from one of the posts above that you had no browser navigation links (from a pop-up), and that would be against TOS. But no outbound links? No rule against that.
As for keyword arbitrage being totally parasitic, I'm not so sure. It may indeed serve the marketplace, though probably at the expense of advertisers and publishers in favor of Google. But AdSense's overall success is essential for us to win here. Most "middlemen" don't get credit for the service they provide. I don't think we understand all the dynamics well enough to say that keyword arbitrage is entirely parasitic. It's only human to resent the success of others, especially when it is unclear what service is provided.
I don't think experimentation is the problem at all, it is when a one page experiment shows a small profit and is cloned into a huge venture that the so-called MFA becomes a problem.
Oddly I find a lot of MFA's in my referral stats, and sure enough even though they have a zero PR they will rank high enough for those keywords to get some traffic and pass it along to me.
"I don't see how her model would be sustainable without a continuing investment of time in AdWords/AdWords bidding."
It probably isn't .. but it's a matter of how much time was spent. If you're claiming 6 hours, which you implied in your post .. read Saraah's post again.
I don't see how her model would be sustainable without a continuing investment of time in AdWords/AdWords bidding.
APIs FTW :)
It's actually possible to automate almost everything. Certainly the earned vs. spent money ratio.
With AdSense channels, you know how much per-click you're getting, so you just program a software to keep the AdWords cost lower based on the CTR.
The only necessary work is to find and type the keywords on a form. Adding to AdWords and monitoring the performance would require no work at all. Maybe even getting the keywords can be automated using Google's KeyWordTool.
I didn't get the impression that Saraah's experiment involved APIs, but if she's got that kind of technical expertise, maybe she can make it work.
I know, I don't think she used too, I was just mentioning that MFAs don't require a lot of work, I thought that this was what you were saying when you mentioned "model".
Sorry, my fault :D
That kind of deceitful manipulation is exactly why as an advertiser I'm not willing to pay nearly as much for clicks from the content network as I am from the search network. If I run any ads on the content network at all, that is.
These kind of comments from advertisers always interest me because it's not exactly like the search engines don't trick people. My non-web-savvy mother clicks the top three listings in the search results all the time (the ones that say "sponsored links" way over on the right but show up on top of the real results), because she doesn't know better. She just thinks they're the first results. I'm sure a lot of your search clicks are pretty worthless too.
I don't see how her model would be sustainable without a continuing investment of time in AdWords/AdWords bidding.
I dont understand what kind of time investment is needed in Adwords bidding. I know I am new to adwords and adsense and am learning new things everyday - but it took me hardly 10 mins to setup my adwords campaign for the Experimental site. Once it is setup, why would I want to keep changing it. Hmmm I dont know maybe I am missing something here.
I know we have to research to find the best keywords for lowest bid price but it did'nt take me that much time to find one for 2 cents. Oops maybe I'm getting too much into adwords details and this is an adsense forum.....
--Sarah
