Forum Moderators: martinibuster
HTF -- which is focused on a major arts hobby -- is run on phpBB2 and has been around for at least five years. The administrator charges $285 to run a 486x80 ad above the forum posts on every page for one month.
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I'm trying to decide whether my running an AdSense ad on this site...
1) ...violates any of Google's terms
2) ...is a good deal (I only care about breaking even, not making a profit, since I am happy to support this site).
Here's a relevant snippet from Google's FAQ:
However, you may only display AdWords ads on sites that comply with our program policies and that you own or on sites that you are legally authorized to act on behalf of for the purposes of Google AdSense.
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About profitability or break-even for me... frankly, I'm skeptical.
I'm going to throw out somewhat arbitrary numbers that *DO NOT REFLECT* my current AdSense income, which means I am not violating my AdSense non-disclosure terms. This is purely based upon standard advertising numbers (e.g., from my commissionjunction income, etc.)
Let's say there's a pay-per-click of 15 cents.
And a clickthru rate of one percent.
Using the cited 450K page views, that's $675 per month.
Using the 20,000 unique visitors-per-week and assuming that one percent of this set clicks on an ad each week, that's $120 per month.
With an ad-buy cost of $285 for the month, it's clear that in the first scenario I'll be substantially profiting, and in the second, I'll be substantially losing.
Additionally, there's no guarantee that AdSense will show a majority of non-PSAs on this site, despite the relatively targeted content. Thus my take could be even lower than described above.
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What are your thoughts, both on legality (following Google's terms) and profitability?
I also don't agree with your interpretation of legal authorization to act on behalf of his site. If you cannot immediately remove your code from his site, you're not authorized to act on behalf of it.
This question has come up before and the consensus has always been that it's a bad idea.
Ability to immediately remove code
If he invokes my snippet of javascript via a php or ssi include, then it's simply a matter of me replacing the code on *MY* server at a moment's notice should the need arise. Since I'm a trusted member of this site, I'm confident that the administrator would have no problems letting me do this.
Other reasons?
Can you clue me in to what other objections there might be? And would you care to tackle the profitability issue? If this is a bad gamble financially, then it doesn't matter whether I CAN do it :D
Regarding profitability, I think that you are not accounting for the percentage of PSAs that a Phpbb board might generate. Run some tests with the "try before you sell" tools out in the web, Go to that board and use some of their thread ids.
I would say that even if the thread id does not change, you will lose a lot of impressions to the fact that the mediapartners bot is not as quick as it used to be.
Within a few page views of a thread, the AdSense code will display targeted ads unless there is another issue involved.
There are a few things that would make me reluctant to do this on another site.
You have no control over click incentives. What if a discussion begins about "what are those ads at the top of these boards?" or "Hey, I started a thread about fuzzy widgets, and all of a sudden, I see ads for fuzzy widgets!" As a site owner, you could delete it. As a paying advertiser on another site, you cannot.
As the banner would be on the top, take into account that this would violate the AdSense terms for appearing on search result pages when people do searches on the boards.
You have no control over click incentives..... As a site owner, you could delete it. As a paying advertiser on another site, you cannot.Good catch.
As the banner would be on the top, take into account that this would violate the AdSense terms for appearing on search result pages when people do searches on the boards.IMHO, this would not be a capital sin, but Jenstar is right I just went to a friend's Phpbb and the search result page uses the global template so your ad would be there.
Run some tests with the "try before you sell" tools out in the web, Go to that board and use some of their thread ids.
I would say that even if the thread id does not change, you will lose a lot of impressions to the fact that the mediapartners bot is not as quick as it used to be.
You have no control over click incentives. What if a discussion begins about "what are those ads at the top of these boards?" or "Hey, I started a thread about fuzzy widgets, and all of a sudden, I see ads for fuzzy widgets!" As a site owner, you could delete it. As a paying advertiser on another site, you cannot.
I suppose in a worst case scenario, I could pull the ads... but this would:
- only be possible if I actually NOTICED the discussion
- also put me way in the $ hole :¦
As the banner would be on the top, take into account that this would violate the AdSense terms for appearing on search result pages when people do searches on the boards.
How *DO* people handle this on boards like phpBB and InvisionBoard and so on? On each of these boards (from everything I've seen), the boardwrapper (which includes any element consistent by page) is shown on EVERY page, message and search boxes included.
Frankly, I've assumed that this was one of those areas in which Google would look the other way; the number of searches on any normal discussion board is, I'd guess, an extremely small percentage of total page views. On this particular board I'm talking about, in fact, the search feature is lousy AND the search link is almost invisible. I also know from my own board that a very, very tiny percentage of visitors ever use the search feature.
But still, it's TECHNICALLY a violation, and while police officers may decide to rarely if ever pull over someone driving 56mph on the freeway, I suppose it's possible that Google could not only pull someone over, but revoke their 'license' for such a minimal transgression.
Wow, lots of food for thought. Thanks, folks!
But still, it's TECHNICALLY a violation
Applied to your example, the police may not pull someone over for going 56mph, but if they also notice no seatbelt and a burned out headlight, your odds of getting pulled over have just jumped up dramatically. The same could be said for AdSense. One thing could raise a flag, but no action taken, but if they notice two or three small violtions, then they might.
For phpbb, it means instead of just putting the code into the header template, it means editing plenty of template files to begin running AdSense. It is worth it if you own the message boards. But I can't see someone doing it all for one month for an advertiser.
Just my 2 yen.
How *DO* people handle this on boards like phpBB and InvisionBoard and so on? On each of these boards (from everything I've seen), the boardwrapper (which includes any element consistent by page) is shown on EVERY page, message and search boxes included.
The way I handled it was to create two separate header pages for phpBB - one with Adsense, one with a link to affiliates. Then modified the PHP for Search, Registration, and any other pages I wasn't 100% positive on to load the second template (affiliates).
Surprisingly Adsense seems to handle my phpBB quite well, and I get ads on all topics - although inexplicably I do get ads on my "member only" areas (not PSA's, since I'm using alternate ads). Since this would seem to be a fault of some sort with the Google Bot, I'm not terribly worried about changing it - I certainly expected Google to fail if it attempted to access these pages. Perhaps it got in on a cached login, but I doubt it's going to be of much concern to anyone.
HTH
matt
However, as pointed out, you do get a higher proportion of PSA's - mainly because of session ids, which seem to pop up randomly. However, if you use the Alternate ad option to display the original banner ads and charge a percentage of what you did before, you could minimise losses.
I think you'll find members prefer Adsense ads to banners (depends on the banner, of course). Mine have told me how impressed they are by the targeting and I think there's a constant wow factor: 'Hey, I started this thread about Tree Frogs 5 minutes ago, and it's already displaying ads for Tree Frog Holidays.'
I do get a lower CTR than others seem to, but that's inevitable on a forum - much higher rate of repeat visitors.
Someone above comments that users will stop looking at the ads - I'm not sure that's the case, IF they notice that the ads are constantly changing according to the topic of the thread.
You do not need to do anything to make phpBB media-bot friendly (although maybe some tweaking to remove as many SID's as possible) - mediabot doesn't follow links, it just comes directly in to new pages when they are first visited. So if your url is xxxxx.com/viewtopic.php?t=324 then it comes in and looks at that page, no more. If that url has?sid=4535438543785974398 at the end of it then you've wasted a bit of bandwidth, as that sid isn't going to come up again.
Having said that I have seen targeted ads on SID pages - site-specific, not page specific though.
Roddy
But given that I'm already a bit, well, on the rocks with AdSense already, I've decided that (channel senior Bush voice here) it would not be prudent for me to try posting my AdSense code on a site that I do not have full control over... thanks, largely, to the thoughtful feedback offered to me in this thread.
My adventurer-side is, of course, deeply disappointed. But sometimes, it's just not worth taking risks.
