Big Adsense partner leaves the family

CNN.com is gone, what does this mean for us

[loanuniverse]

CNN.com is no longer providing Google SERPs and is no longer showing adsense. This got me thinking that since Yahoo is considering the purchase of AOL {according to the rumors} that Google’s decision to get all of us little fish into the mix seems like a very good strategy.

By looking at the numbers shown in the Google SEC filing, it seems as if the army of publishers in the Adsense network is responsible for most of the revenue growth of the company. Will our position in the great skim of things improve now that Google’s revenue stream will be more reliant on us?

Will the competition look at Google and said something like “We took away Big-Site-X, We took Big-Site-Y, but in order to get those sites We had to give them a lot of money, maybe we should go after a bunch of these little sites and really get them where it hurts”.

You know there a lot of complaints from advertisers about the Adsense program. Some of them can be supported with a sensible argument. These perceived weaknesses could be exploited by companies when they introduce a competing product.

For example:

Advertisers can not decide which sites will show their ads Could this be approached by the system grabbing the first 100 matches where theoretically the ad might show and present it to an advertiser as part of an advanced targeting option in the form of a list of links. You know something like:

Our Adbot has determined that the following sites seem to be the best match for your ad. This does not mean that your ad will not be shown in other pages in our network. However, these pages are a representative sample. Please click on those sites that you want to exclude.

What do you guys think?

[alika]

Competition is always good. It's been almost a year since Adsense was launched to the general public (not just to premium publishers) and we have yet to see significant competition. A significant barrier to entry would be the huge costs -- particularly administrative -- involved in dealing with hundreds of thousands of small publishers.

Hence, Overture deemed it wise to offer their program only to big publishers -- less management costs & time, less administrative hassles, and less likely to engage in fraudulent activities. They can then focus their resources in providing better technology to target ads, better reporting and providing better customer service to their publishers. As such, Overture can offer sweeter deals to big publishers like CNN.com

Now, how will the loss of big publishers like CNN affect the small publishers? Offhand, we can say that more inventory will be available to smaller publishers. In the long term, though, one impact may be on how advertisers perceive the Adsense program -- without big guys like CNN.com, there is "less prestige" in the publishers pool; advertisers may be less confident to place their ads given the thinking that there is increased likelihood of fraud among smaller publishers. There may be a shift in thinking that the Overture program is the "premium tier" while Adsense is more like the remnant or secondary tier publishers.

Just my 2 cents.

[vredungmand]

Getting smaller fish into the game is certainly a winner provided that they can keep the servicing and quality assurance costs down.

Currently there is absolutely no contact between advertisers and publishers, this helps to keep Google's margins high but it only works when there are many advertisers and many publishers.

Google is certainly open for competing brokers that allow more contact/selection/other communication between advertisers and publishers, but in the long run those brokers would likely see lower margins than Google.

[Jenstar]

Did CNN.com show AdSense originally? They made the search switch yesterday [webmasterworld.com] but they had already been showing Overture's ContentMatch for 3 or so weeks. I can't recall AdSense on CNN though, unless it was just in the search results.

About three weeks ago, CNN began showing ContentMatch, first in just the entertainment section of the site. I am guessing it was very profitable for them, because about a week or so later, they were all over the site, and with quite prominent placement.

However, CNN choosing ContentMatch for AdSense had to have been a blow for AdSense, because the vast majority of news sites are using AdSense.

And FWIW, if people thought AdSense had problems showing inappropriate ads on news stories, ContentMatch is far, far worse. They obviously have no stop-word filter, because I am seeing ads showing up on news stories about kidnappings, murders, etc. I believe CNN has noticed this too, because they seem to be manually removing ContentMatch from some pages.

[loanuniverse]

Jenstar: I don't remember seeing the ads in the actual pages, but I assume that the search results from the cnn.com search was enhanced by google including adword ads.

On the other hand, the ads I am seeing in the content pages by Overture right now show how difficult it is to get contextual ads right for a site that touches on so many topics as CNN does. Targeting is way off...

Alika: I think that is a good point. There is a reason why the networks fight after the big fish by offering better deals. Besides the large amount of ad space, they get the benefit of increasing the overall perception of quality... not actual quality of the network, but then again perception is reality.

vredungmand: I agree while there is a benefit to being first in the market, if someone can come up with a better mousetrap early in the game they can catch up really quick, and I think we all agree is still early in the game.

[Jenstar]

Yes, targeting is way off, and their stop word filter definitely needs work.

Discussion on Overture's ContentMatch shows inappropriate ads [webmasterworld.com] continues here.

I find the connection between AOL and CNN makes the decision to use ContentMatch and not AdSense very interesting though.