Forum Moderators: martinibuster
[google.com...]
Not sure if this should be in Google News or adwords. I guess this forum should really be the one for AdSense questions as it's about advertising.
Also, it seems that the site hangs in IE. Mozilla ( as usual ) works perfectly so use that.
Unlike the exising content targed ads you do not need 20 million visitors to put these ads on your site.
To send you out 8 very small cheques over a period of 8 months would cost *you* more than $18!
I mean, I'm French, I don't have a company and I don't have any tax-id number. Maybe it would be better to add that the tax-id is required only for some kind of people :-/
Thanks for your replies.
From a business standpoint it is always better to have money in your pocket, no matter the sum because of lost potential.
Yes, absolutely correct.
But what you don't seem to follow is the cost in administration of sending out many small payments.
This means that google have to set a limit (they've chosen $100) to make it worthwhile, not only in terms of having the benefit of cashflow (as you quite rightly point out), but also to keep the profit margin high enough that they can offer subscribers a reasonable PPC.
The cost of that administration, if they sent out $15 cheques every month would cost you, the webmaster subscriber, more than $18 over an 8 month period I would bet (you don't actually think that google would pay for the cost of sending out large quantity small value cheques?).
So you are actually better off forgoing the interest to google, and getting a better rate of PPC.
Who cares what google makes - what is more important is what the webmaster makes from the system.
We will only know for sure google's costing structure when they say what they will be paying PPC - or subscribers comment on that.
I would add that if you expect to only get $100 every 8 month period, its surely not worth you bothering to subscribe to Adsense anyway?
TJ
If you build a content site and you serve Adsense, you will find yourself counting a handful of dollars, whilst leading customers off your site to ad destinations.
This is also part of the dilema.
The way I look at it is like this. I have one totally content/non-profit site which has never made a bean but is popular in it's niche.
Being content/non-profit, the retailer/profit websites are not my competition.
So if I go sending users off to retail sites, I am not losing a "customer" - I also have enough confidence in the quality of the site to know that they will be back anyway, even if they then find another content site via the link.
So, I think Adsense, in theory, suits sites like this one perfectly.
The only question that really needs to be answered is *how much $$*.
I'm not sure if this is the case in the US, but in Europe, it's cheaper to host websites on "non-commercial" servers. Our content/hobby site is on such a server (obviously). If we subscribed to something like Adsense, we would actually have to move over to a commercial server, at some expense to us (or risk the ISP finding out and chucking us off).
Google expect us to do that without even being able to make a guess on the level of payment we would receive.
I guess the best policy is wait, let others be the guinea pigs and wait for them to come and report on here what kinds of PPC rates they are getting?
TJ
Googleguy, the css file is still stalling my browser i'm using win2000 and ie 6.0.28 .
I don't think it's the CSS file. I have had an intermittant problem with the actual ads, of them stalling the whole page in IE 6.
I know that IE 6 has problems with certian HTTP headers, but not sure of the specific fix. Even if the CSS file was stalled it would not effect the display of the page.
However, the stalling of javascript will. There is a trick that some web desigers use that goes like this :
<script></script>. Simple, but what it does is stall the page loading untill all extra files are loaded - preventing a flash of ( css ) unstyled content.
If anyone has seen this HTTP weirdnes please help Google fix this!
I guess the best policy is wait, let others be the guinea pigs and wait for them to come and report on here what kinds of PPC rates they are getting?
Nope. It's against Google AsSense T&C to disclose clickthrough rates.
Furthermore I'm not very happy about hte whole cloak'n'dagger about the CTR rates. It doesn't bode well. the fatct is that realistic CTR on website ads is always lower then what people think and I can imagine why google doesn't want them disclosed. But I believe playing with a closed hand will ultimately harm them.
Another thing is that even the google spider cannot categorise my site very well at times. It's a local directory, and for example the category "widgets" ranks #1 for "widgets" on google, which is inappropriate because it is a national site for "country" so it should rank # only for "widgets country" and somewhat lover on "widgets" behind sites about widgets in general and internationally.
I'm afraid Adsense will also not be able to pick up on that. After all I'm not going to repeat "country" on each page when teh page is called "widget directry for country". no human would mistake it. It'd be like askinbg hotmal to say its an email system on each page.
How can I give these kinds of hints to the AdSense system, to ensure it delivers ads relevant for my visitors?
On hte other hand I want to give some valuable content to out-of-market visitors, so therefore it might be a good thing if AdSense targets jsut the same as the google SERPS. After all I'll get those people from SERPS that searched for "widgets" and they realise it'S a localised directory, and perhaps click the AdWord ads.
I just think there are still some issues to AdSense, and like AdWords, it would benefit from several more features and points of control, both for Google as well as their Adwordtizers (tm) ;)
SN
But what you don't seem to follow is the cost in administration of sending out many small payments.
The affiliate programs that I affiliate with all have minimum payouts in the $10 to $25 range with commissions I see as fair. So I don’t see why Google can't do the same.
So I don’t see why Google can't do the same.
Because they don't need your business. Google is big enough to start something like this in the way that they mean to carry it on.
They're obviously aiming their structure at the >$100 a month/2 months worth of click-through sites.
As I have stated, it's impossible to know if this will work for you without knowing the fee scales. It may be a case of suck it and see.
But you're right, it's a waste of time for you if you have to wait 8 months for a cheque. That's the part I need to calculate and work out for myself also, but we can't do that within any reasonable guess without knowing what the PPC fee's are.
The problem with my site is to run Adsense I need to switch to a commercial server and it's impossible to tell if that's worthwhile or not.
Very tricky call.
What are your other affiliates like? Can anyone recommend something similar to Adsense, but where you know where you are financially?
TJ
I have a page about a band who share a name with a type of computer. Lots of surfers arrive at that page despite never having heard of the band (they are pretty obscure) - obviously looking for the computers. Adsense will probably serve adverts for the computer connection which will be a service for the surfers.
On the other hand, most of my traffic is from Google serps. Surfers will possibly be served exactly the same adverts that they just saw on the Google page they just left - will they react negatively to this?
