Forum Moderators: goodroi
Harvard professor Ben Edelman calls it conversion-inflation syndication fraud. We call it typical Google.In early February, at a net-conscious conference in San Francisco, Edelman exposed one of those online boondoggles that shows you just how much Google overplays the efficiency of its web-dominating ad system.
Reported at The Register:
[theregister.co.uk...]
Is The Register being unethical by running an article like this while displaying three Google ad units on the same page?
No, not at all.
True journalists should not care about what their advertisers think about their writings (but many journos and publishers have forgotten this). The writers at The Register should not self-censor their stories just because someone in their company decided to run Google ads.
If Google is uncomfortable with critical discussion, they can (as you never get tired to explain) easily terminate the contract.
Also, no one has suggested that Google is "uncomfortable with critical discussion"--an issue that, in any case, has nothing to do with the question of whether The Register's management is being unethical or hypocritical in facilitating the "conversion fraud" that's being decried in its own coverage. Still, let's be fair to The Register's managment: For all we know, The Register's honchos may simply believe that their columnist is wrong. :-)
[edited by: signor_john at 6:52 pm (utc) on May 24, 2009]
- Ford buys car ads on NYTimes.com. A NEW YORK TIMES reporter views a NYTimes.com page online and sees a Ford ad. That's waste circulation, at least from Ford's point of view, but it's a small enough piece of the total to be unimportant.
- Anheuser-Busch buys a Bud Lite commercial during the Super Bowl commercial on TV. Most Anheuser-Busch employees, Bud Lite distributors, and the TV network's own employees watch the Super Bowl, but Bud Lite doesn't get a credit for the number of viewers who have a connection to Anheuser-Busch or the TV network. Those viewers are "waste circulation," but that's just how the business works.
Ultimately, whether waste circulation is a problem depends on how much waste circulation there is. In the unlikely event that Google's CPC ads are resulting in a significant amount of waste circulation for advertisers, those advertisers are likely to spend their money elsewhere, or enough of them will complain loudly enough for Google to eliminate such wasted clicks.
You seem to be totally missing the problem of parasitic advertising techniques that aggressively and actively intercept the clickstream of users who would otherwise would have reached the site they were looking for at no cost to said site.
Advertisers are stuck paying for visitors that they would have received for free if outside parties had not interfered.
The mechanism in this scenario is very, very different from the Register (or you or me) displaying ads on their own web page that users have visited by choice.
It seems to me that the study and the column were half-baked, and the column shouldn't have been published until the allegations were supported by evidence. "True journalists" (to use Zett's phrase) do their homework before they file their stories.
Side note: This thread hasn't attracted much interest on the GOOG forum. Maybe somebody needs to start a similar thread on the AdWords forum and see if advertisers (the victims of Google's supposed fraud) think The Examiner's allegations are both believable and a big deal.
was paying for Google ad clicks from its own site?
That is not the allegation here.
That, I think, is not accidental...
Zett, you seem to be confusing "the writers at The Register" with the The Register's managemement.
Again - no.
A true publisher should not have to care about what the editorial team actually writes (as long as it is within the topical boundaries of the publication); it's the role of the management to monetize the publication.
Of course, The Register's management team is not acting unethical. Not at all. They would act unethical if they suddenly would STOP publishing Google critical articles (for the sake of the peace with Google), because then they would start to influence the content. And again - as long as Google is happy with their ads on The Register, where is the problem?
