Forum Moderators: martinibuster
A. The number of AdSense publishers is already HUGE and growing (just browsing around shows that)
B. The number of Advertisers is diminishing compared to the growth in the number of publishers.
C. No niche has a high enough barrier to entry to keep you safe.
D. The effect of Yahoo, MSN and others .. Coming to play is negligible as they most likely will not be creating new Advertisers but cannibalizing existing ones (unlike energy, they are a finite resource that cannot be created but can be destroyed)
E. The highest annual growth is in number of surfers, more traffic for publishers, but with diminishing Advertisers and dilution of Publisher's niche it would work an opposite effect and you fall into the SmartPricing black hole.
F. Having multiple sites and topics solves none of the above concerns.
G. What we will see 5 to 10 years from now is the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer; with few top of the hill publishers getting all the good EPC, and probably millions of publishers with diluted topics (even if the content is good) struggling for SmartPriced 1 cent scraps.
H. Speaking of content, there will be a time when unique quality content will not cut it anymore as the number of publishers grow, so will the amount of unique quality content while the number of topics remain the unchanged.
I. Publishers will benefit with lower CPC, Google will survive by adapting to the best business model of the day and make money no matter what, what's left will be publishers, and lots of those.
J. Are we really heading due to all this to a cheap CPM world, and CPC becoming a niche commodity for top players only?
How do you see yourself in year 2016?
In all seriousness, I think your post, whilst some elements are likely to happen is un-necessarily bleak.
When I started adsense two years ago there was little in the way of inventory to fill my banners - now there is no shortage of advertisers.
In my niche, my advertisers could take out ads in their local papers to advertise their services - some probably do. That would cost a *lot* more than an adsense campaign, and in all probability be a lot less effective. Anyone searching for the specific information on the service they provide is likely to look on the web, and are extremely likely to find my site. Now if the page they view has providors local to them showing, then the ads are likely to be very effective.
Targetted advertising is cheap, and effective for advertisers. I personally see this growing as long as the following happens:-
1. Google keeps on top of fraudulent clicks. Advertisers will accept low conversion from clicks to an extent - a magazine ad gets loads of views but only a small number of sales. Fraud is another matter. I personally believe Googe are aware of this, and working on it. Progress isn't as rapid as we'd like, but it's in the right direction.
2. Google works hard on targetting the inventory of ads it has. If it can provide relevant ads, for real advertisers in your local area then adsense will become one of the most effective methods available. This is happening, but there is a lot of work to do yet.
I know there is a problem with people gaming the system. This will always happen, and Google will always be one step behind. As long as they are pro-active in targetting and removing these people, then adsense will still be a winner in 2016.
I think quality will still be a requirement to do well out of adsense for publishers. There is quite a large public backlash to scrapers and junk sites. People go to a search engine to find information on whatever they are interested it. People want relevant and accurate searches, and to find the information they are looking for on the first page of results. Information does not include scraped junk - Google know this, and if they want Google to be viable in the future they need to address this. They are doing so I believe, but will always be one step behind the gamers.
I personally don't think the future is so bleak as long as Google keep working for all of us.
Anyway, some things will be resolved until 2016...
a) Copyright - publishers will start to protect their content (whatever content that may be) more fiercly than in the past. There is a slight potential that the "search enine model" where a spider may automatically spider the content will be replaced by a strictly "opt-in" model. (Just think about it - if an automated tool hits your site, you may sue these guys.)
b) Content - yes, I agree, the sheer size of "content" will be unbelievable for todays standard. BUT the amount of QUALITY content will not explode in a similar fashion. Just think of digital imaging, e.g. taking pictures and videos with cheap devices. More content? Sure. Better content? Probably not.
c) Search Engines - will be king, because there is sooo much trash on the web by then (see b). But the business models will change (see a). The search engine that FINALLY solves spam will rule. Personally, I don't think it will be Google. I see Microsoft in this role for many reasons.
d) Internet Bubble # 2 - will explode with a big bang mid-term. Just let Google loose some lawsuits and let Microsoft and Yahoo get their grips on the ad market (and on the publishers), and the nice facade cracks. Investors flee from inflated stock towards more reliable stock (and yes, renewable energy is a safe bet).
e) China - will potentially be more important as a market than the US and Europe. So we better think about creating content for Chinese audiences. They will consume a lot, and they are soo many. An exciting market.
f) Mobile - access to the Internet will finally have lifted off. Still too early to predict what exactly will happen, but it will be exciting as well.
MERRY CHRISTMAS & A HAPPY NEW YEAR
-- Mark
A lot of what you have written doesn't make sense and a much of it seems more about #*$!ing the ways things are, rather than gazing 10 years out. They are not facts.
For example 'B' - well everything points to a dramatic growth in online advertising. Besides, the number of advertisers is meaningless. It's the value of the pool.
I have friends who have run sites for years and were happy to get $1000 a month, even in dot com boom days. This was a time when CPM was the rage, then in fell into the toilet $0.20 eCPM were common. Mist
Now they get that $1000 a day. Granted traffic has increased but at a much slower pace than earnings. And yes, I see most sites with CPC much lower than 2 years ago, but their true eCPM (dollars earned over page impression as measeured by log analyis) has skyrocketed. The earnings are in the words of one friend 'embarassingly high' for the little effort he puts into it.
A. Many people can type. Should that concern us?
B. There are fewer businesses than the people who consume their services? Nothing new there.
C. See A.
D. There are 1000s of magazines, too. I don't see fewer magazine ads being the outcome.
E. If you mean that discernment will set in I see 2 sides to that concern.
F. More sites adds what value?
G. What I see is that with all those choices and easy and immediate access to websites that traffic will gravitate towards value.
H. 6 billion people is a lot to share.
I. This all assumes that Google's model is the be all and end all.
J. You left out ROI. Money gravitates towards ROI.
The definition of publishing will change as will the methodology. Publishing now includes user generated content. Do they think of themselves "as publishers"?
The methodology has moved from print to listserv to email to BBS to websites to blogs to RSS and will continue to evole.
As a fallback position I suggest you get a law degree. That way you can recapture and/or generate revenue by suing those who wrongfully profit by republishing your content without your permission. :)
[edited by: Webwork at 3:28 pm (utc) on Dec. 24, 2005]
All this local newspapers persuading small companies to advertise in the local area.
But internet promotion works also in the local area much better.
I see myself in 10 years with about 18000 pages.
1500 pages more per year.
A. The number of AdSense publishers is already HUGE and growing (just browsing around shows that)
The growth rate isn't sustainable indefinitely, though. (To use a comparison, I doubt if the number of Commission Junction affiliates is currently growing at the rate of several years ago.)
B. The number of Advertisers is diminishing compared to the growth in the number of publishers.
Who told you that?
C. No niche has a high enough barrier to entry to keep you safe.
Safe from what? Competition?
D. The effect of Yahoo, MSN and others .. Coming to play is negligible as they most likely will not be creating new Advertisers but cannibalizing existing ones (unlike energy, they are a finite resource that cannot be created but can be destroyed)
Where do you get the idea that only Google can "create advertisers"?
E. The highest annual growth is in number of surfers, more traffic for publishers, but with diminishing Advertisers and dilution of Publisher's niche it would work an opposite effect and you fall into the SmartPricing black hole.
Dilution isn't the same as smart pricing. Also, in a market where junk inventory is growing faster than quality inventory, the quality inventory becomes more valuable, not less.
F. Having multiple sites and topics solves none of the above concerns.
That's probably true, because sites that are created for the sake of diversification (as opposed to sites that are created by people who know and care about their topics) are likely to be of mediocre quality at best, and mediocre won't cut it as advertisers and ad networks (including AdSense) refine their methods.
G. What we will see 5 to 10 years from now is the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer; with few top of the hill publishers getting all the good EPC, and probably millions of publishers with diluted topics (even if the content is good) struggling for SmartPriced 1 cent scraps.
"Few" is relative. Some people have the mistaken idea that big portal sites, news sites, etc. will drive out the little guy. But in the world of trade and enthusiast publications (which is analogous to the contextual advertising world), thousands of specialized publications are extremely profitable, because they can deliver targeted audiences. Once online ad networks figure out how to combine contextual advertising with better audience targeting, the value of networks like AdSense will grow exponentially.
H. Speaking of content, there will be a time when unique quality content will not cut it anymore as the number of publishers grow, so will the amount of unique quality content while the number of topics remain the unchanged.
Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, "content" is not a bulk commodity. A few months, an executive of a specialized ad network that represents Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, and other travel sites told me that "there's very little good content on the Web." (Interestingly enough, his ad network is doing extremely well with national tourist offices and other advertisers who have been slow to spend money with lowest-common-denominator networks like AdSense.)
I. Publishers will benefit with lower CPC, Google will survive by adapting to the best business model of the day and make money no matter what, what's left will be publishers, and lots of those.
Sure, and most publishers will fail or just scrape along. So what? Most businesses in the offline world don't succeed, either. Why should the online world be different?
J. Are we really heading due to all this to a cheap CPM world, and CPC becoming a niche commodity for top players only?
Why do you assume that CPM is always "cheap" and that CPC is inherently worth more than CPM?
How do you see yourself in year 2016?
If I'm not dead, I expect that I'll be doing much the same thing that I've been doing since 1996: creating editorial content that meets the needs of my target audience. Whether revenues come from affiliate links, AdSense ads, specialized ad networks, sponsorships, and/or other specific forms of advertising really isn't too important. (With a "content site," it's a lot easier to change one's revenue model than it is with, say, an affiliate site or a made-for-AdSense site.)
I can barely see past tomorrow, but as I look back, I see that nothing stays the same on the web for even a day.
Yes and no. A lot of the basics don't change. Take a media site like NYTimes.com: It wasn't running PPC ads in its early days, and it probably didn't supplement its news coverage with video clips or slide shows back in the 1990s, but its core product and business model are essentially identical to what they were in the 1990s.
On the other hand, if you're creating sites to ride the current wave (whether that wave is affiliate marketing, AdSense, or something else), then you'll probably need to reinvent yourself every year or two--just as you'd need to reinvent yourself if you were creating brick-and-mortar businesses that were designed to meet relatively short-term needs (such as video-rental stores, which were popping up all over the place years ago but are now in decline because of competition from mass-market sellers of videos, more efficient rental-distribution channels such as NetFlix, etc.).
The big reason is I don't expect to be working the business then. I expect to be really, truly retired (not like now), and I want to be able to get a nice price for the business when I sell down the road.
In order to do that, I have to develope a model that works for 2025, so I can prove the business will be rock solid through many more decades. It takes vision. You have to see the future, using the mistakes from the past, and the tools of today. Vision.
Diversity. That is the seed planted in 2005. It is a different version than the diversity seed planted in 2004, and very much different than the seed planted in 2003.
I always have my eye on the future. It takes little tiny baby steps, and we take those steps, one at a time.
Happy Holidays To All.
I have only 6 hours left to shop. I was done long ago. But, I have to be out there, among the masses. Seeing what they are buying in those final moments. Seeing how deep the sales are. Learning. Strolling. Listening to music. Listening to the buzz. Looking for clues. I do it every year. Tuning my crystal ball. If you are in marketing, you should too.
Why? Because I was convinced that I couldn't make any more. I kept my blinders on to the opportunities around me. I didn't even know about adsense until a year after everyone else was already making their fortunes.
I don't know about you, but I still know people that don't have an internet connection. That means that there is still a lot of growing potential for the net.
It is now over 10 years from when I first started. I took the blinders off a year or so ago, and am now looking at any and all money making opportunities I find on the net. Not all of them pan out, but I am currently making nearly $1000 daily.
Don't keep yourself anchored down to just adsense. Keep your eyes open and look for opportunities. Have you ever wondered why people are paying you so much to put their ads on your page? Most people that buy that ad space, are making much more than they are paying. Find out what they are doing, and do the same. It may take some work, and some learning, but don't box yourself in by depending soley on adsense.
Having said this, I will be 34 years old by then and if things go as planned I will have semiretired from the internet business world and started my investing/traveling the world career :)
I think it will become harder and harder to earn money on the Web, you'll need more and more knowledge and you'll need to keep up with all new technologies or the competition will probably crush you. I have a feeling 'the golden times' will be over by 2016, it will still be possible for starters to earn money but you'll need to be a lot more inventive than now.
Ten years on the Internet is a very long time and it's hard to make predictions. For instance, who would have guessed five years ago that a new search engine would launch a revolutionary contextual PPC advertising program, not many I guess.
Anyway I hope I won't have to worry about this anymore in 2016, by then my money should do the work for me :) Another goal is to launch something truly useful, not just another website but a service that will benefit millions of people ;-)
Banking on the net and your ability to keep up with the next twist or turn is just too risky to be reinvesting at any great rate. Minimize the risk by moving some of the revenue outside of this single business model.
By 2016 there will be no spam problems, relevancy will be tight due to perfected search engine algorithms. Publishing credentials and your personal history will be a factor in your income, gamers of the system will have to work physically underground, online security will be the rave (even more than now), the Internet will mature to be a paranoid but safe place against its own initial vision, it has a destiny to fulfill: Carry online all that can be carried from the physical world and interconnect all that can be plugged in. Advertising will comfortably jump media (from pc, mobile, solar panel on your parked car, to the LCD on your shoes) and be 100% personalized but less annoying as your income as a consumer will depend on knowing and making the right selections. Google will still be there, along with a handful of other search engines, they will all be tapping into one database that has all and everything human beings have ever digitized, and they will pay to access it, we the users won't, we will give up the luxury of blocking ads for the freebies that we will get to depend on. Just random pictures of the future, then perhaps its just more of the same ..
Now down to reality:
When the number of publishers increase, the percentage of quality to trash being the same, the amount of quality content will increase, each quality content publisher will earn less in the end, simple maths.
Number of advertisers will increase, and yes many off line advertisers will come online, but when their increase is disproportionate to the explosion in the number of publishers, publishers will earn less, and yes when there are 1000's of magazines, you will see less ads or at least less ad revenue / magazine.
No one said CPM has to be cheap, but I am predicting that it might be heading that way.
Thanks for the inspiring replies.
When the number of publishers increase, the percentage of quality to trash being the same, the amount of quality content will increase, each quality content publisher will earn less in the end, simple maths.
But the ratio of quality content to trash won't stay the same. Junk sites progagate at a faster rate than quality sites do, simply because they're easier and cheaper to make than quality sites are.
Also, "simple maths" don't apply to complex real-world situations. Even if theaverage compensation per publisher were to drop, that wouldn't mean all publishers would earn less in the end. Some publishers would prosper, others would do okay, others would scrape by, and others would see their earnings shrivel to almost nothing.
Number of advertisers will increase, and yes many off line advertisers will come online, but when their increase is disproportionate to the explosion in the number of publishers, publishers will earn less, and yes when there are 1000's of magazines, you will see less ads or at least less ad revenue / magazine.
Again, it isn't that simple. Even within very narrow niches, you can see examples of magazines that are making money hand over fist and magazines that are going broke. The advertising industry isn't based on communism, and revenues aren't divvied up equally among all players.
No one said CPM has to be cheap, but I am predicting that it might be heading that way.
It will become cheaper or more expensive, depending on where the ads are running. Ditto for CPC ads. Smart pricing gives us a hint of what we're likely to see in the future: a greater emphasis on perceived value to the advertiser. In the offline advertising world, publishers of weekly shoppers don't earn the same CPMs that magazines like CAR AND DRIVER or THE NEW YORKER do, and a newspaper like THE NEW YORK TIMES is likely to earn higher CPMs than a newspaper in Flint, Michigan or Gary, Indiana does.
In the first generation of contextual ad networks, keywords were all that counted; in the future, audience quality will be equally important.
As mentioned in my thread "I could save 3 people",
I know several people with the possiblity to make their living by AdSense.
As I have also a internet promotion web site, I rank high in the German SERPs, I get also many requests their for internet promotion.
Some requests are about improving poor small web sites. Talking on the telephone, it turns soon out,
the person has no money to pay professional SEO fees, but has published only the peak of the iceberg of all his interesting stuff.
In this case, I make a special offer. A license agreement to be instructed to use my CMS and built up a real great web site about all his stuff.
20% of all advertising revenues for my efforts.
Not one of them was using my offer in the past.
From the thread "I could save 3 people", one of them is now starting with my ideas. I estimate it will take until April to make his site ready for AdSense application.
Just because more publishers pop up does not mean that the people publishing quality sites and information are going to lose substantial amounts of traffic.
Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, "content" is not a bulk commodity. A few months, an executive of a specialized ad network that represents Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, and other travel sites told me that "there's very little good content on the Web." (Interestingly enough, his ad network is doing extremely well with national tourist offices and other advertisers who have been slow to spend money with lowest-common-denominator networks like AdSense.)
This point can not be overlooked, by the way. When I first got into the Internet back in 1994 it was as an ISP. I knew from the very beginning that providing access to the net was being a commodity broker. There was no real value or differentation down the road. And it was 100% accurate. Publishing is an entirely different thing. If you are able to deliver qualified and quality content to end-users then you will be able to monetize it and make money.
I don't think the number of people able to write quality content has increased to match the number of sites we have now. As things continue to grow that disparity is not going to get better. Those who are able to best manage, acquire and create content will be the big winners.
But we are the ones who care enough to stay on top of the current changes or we wouldn't be here on WW. So I suspect we will be adapt to the changes and do just fine.
DeadAs a beliver in reincarnation, I will try to pass my domains and my AdSense account into my next life time.
Dead
will try to pass my domains and my AdSense account into my next life time
10 years later, it would be just a new world, we probably no longer running the web or most of the existing technologies.
Books are still around many centuries after printing presses were invented. Newspapers and magazines are still around long after they were introduced. Radio is still earning money for station owners nearly a century after the first commercial station began broadcasting, and television is raking in audiences and advertising dollars 50 years after Howdy Doody and The Honeymooners.
I suspect that the Web will be around for a while, too. Production technologies may change (just as they have in printing, where lithography has largely replaced letterpress and intaglio, or in television, where cable, videocassettes, DVD, and now digital HDTV have enhanced the medium)), but there's no reason to assume that the Web itself doesn't have staying power.
What we're doing here is almost identical to what many of us were doing back in the 1980s, when CompuServe, GEnie, and Delphi were in their heyday. The forum software may be different, but otherwise, it's "same old, same old." Ditto for download sites like Tucows, which are simply newer versions of BBSes from the 1980s and the ftp servers of the early 1990s.
Some media formats have greater lasting power than others do, of course. Remember online chat? It's still around, but it isn't nearly as popular as it was in 1990s, and the real-time conversation crowd now have a more efficient alternative in instant messaging.
Within the advertising industry, we've also seen quite a bit of change with the rise of sales promotion, frequency marketing, etc. at the expense of traditional mass-market advertising, and with improvements on old concepts (direct-response advertising and direct mail) with new technologies (PPC advertising on the Web, and the ability to create customized lists and mailings with PC-based tools). But these changes are mostly evolutionary, not revolutionary, and they often work in tandem with older, established media formats and technologies.
Mail-order catalogs are a perfect example of how old and new technologies are working together for the benefit of marketers, customers, and advertising media:
The prospect receives an L.L. Bean or Magellan's catalog, browses through it, sees something that he or she wants to buy, and goes to the company's Web site to place an order (and possibly to buy other things that aren't in the catalog, too). At the same time, the mail-order company may be using PPC ads, display banners, or affiliate programs to bring other prospects into its Web site (or to re-attract customers between catalog mailings). Everybody wins, except for competitors of L.L. Bean or Magellan's who haven't discovered the benefits of leveraging new media to support traditional marketing efforts.
Bottom line: Change happens, but isn't always a case of "either/or," or of discarding the old for the new.
Change happens, but isn't always a case of "either/or," or of discarding the old for the new
I started with Amazon 5 years ago but until now I am not receiving any check. I was with CJ for 4 years and I did not earn a single cent after 500,000 page impression for their 468x60 banners.
I made similar page impression with Linkshare and I could not bank in the check that they sent me.
The only affiliate that earned me some checks was Overture search box. But it was taken over by Yahoo.
I regret that I did not join Google Adsense earlier. Recently after sudden surge in traffic to my site, I realized that I could earn US$20 a day and I have the potential of making US$100 a day just like what others reported in this forum. That is why I quitted my low paid job recently in order to be a full time Adsense publisher. So, I hope Adsense would still be around in 2016 (and I would still be around too). It is a very big gamble that I have taken. If I succeed, I foresee myself getting married at the age of 50. Why? Because I am sitting in front of my PC 20 hours a day creating contents for my web sites. No time to find a girlfriend. :(
But if Google Adsense is no longer around in 2016, then life would be very tough for me as it would be very difficult for me to find a job at the age of 50. :S
Every democratic capitol while have been hit with a nuclear bomb.
Those that survive will be in the mountains or tending their fields.
