Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Actually, we are kind of hoping for your competitors ad dollars
Oh, why didn't you say so? Go ahead, have fun, make money, I'm all for it.
Webmasters are thus creating more pages about high paying topics.
OK, why is this unexpected?
Umm... does it exist for some other reason?
Yes, there is a difference between a legit content site and an Adsense optimized site that exists solely because of highly priced keywords.
No, these are not newspapers.
Yes, it will impact everyone including publishers.
No, pointing out this pitiful practice that has the potential to ruin a great thing for a lot of us is not something to be ashamed of.
you're really grasping at straws trying to justify the creation of these shill sites.I am not doing that, all that I am saying is that the market will correct itself. If the quality of the results deteriorates enough either a competitor will come up with a better product, the program will have to evolve or there just won't be enough paid ads to go around.
Where did you get that from my posts. On the other hand, just like Small Website Guy says, I understand why the proliferation of those types of sites might happen. I always say that advertising drives content. I know that EuropeForVisitors would disagree with me on this, but it looks to me like that is the case on most media.
always say that advertising drives content. I know that EuropeForVisitors would disagree with me on this, but it looks to me like that is the case on most media.
I don't think you'll find too many magazines or newspapers devoted to topics like Mesothelioma. :-) You will find publications about football, travel, fashion, amateur radio, PC gaming, and a host of other topics, but they certainly aren't driven by single ads (as a "high-profit keyword" site would be).
Also, traditional media do regard their content as the product. (In fact, the term "editorial product" is often used.) The content attracts advertising, and better content attracts better advertising. Except for weekly shoppers, you won't find many print publications that consist of ads glued together with computer-generated keywords or text that somebody cribbed from another source.
AdSense's glaring weakness is its complete lack of editorial quality control. Unless Google introduces some kind of tiered network that mainstream advertisers feel comfortable with, AdSense will be paving the way for a more QC-aware competitor's contextual-advertising product.
AdSense's glaring weakness is its complete lack of editorial quality control. Unless Google introduces some kind of tiered network that mainstream advertisers feel comfortable with...
I'd love to see this. Reward those who have really good content sites that have been around for a while without eliminating other sites. Advertisers may be more open to content sites if they had some choice on which level of site their ad appear. Right now it is all or nothing.
On the negative side, Google would take lots of abuse from those who disagreed with their evaluation of where "your" site gets tiered.
As far as making sites specific to "making a buck" this is perhaps a little "grey". But realistically it will happen as the market evolves. Since I don't have these premium type of sites.....can't really worry about it. I do understand that market forces will prevail here and it will settle out. As to the effect it has on the general webmaster...or that it will be the end of adsense....I think this leans towards the melodramatic. If adsense makes sense to the advertisers it will survive...if not then will move on....just like before.
I thought the whole purpose of the internet was for people to make money.
Arpanet, Usenet, Gopher, Mosaic, anyone?
Unless Google introduces some kind of tiered network that mainstream advertisers feel comfortable with...
I'd go along with europeforvisitors and 401khelp one hundred percent. It's not clear to me whether AdSense applications are currently verified by humans or AI, but if they are verified by humans, it ought to be easy enough to give the site an editorial ranking out of 5 when it is accepted.
Then AdWords advertisers can choose whether they would like their PPC adverts to appear on Level One and above sites (ie. all sites displaying AdSense) or Level Five sites only (with the highest editorial standards) or anything in between.
This would increase the incentive for AdSense publishers to improve the quality of their sites so that they could reapply for ranking and, providing they'd made sufficient improvements, get pushed up a notch (allowing them to display more PPC adverts).
It would also give AdWords advertisers more control and more confidence in where their ads were being displayed.
The only problem is that it would involve human review which Google doesn't like because it doesn't fit in with its concept of infinite scalability.
At any rate it would put a stop on sites built specifically for AdSense fouling up the system for everyone else.
Minimum traffic requirements (which you didn't mention, but others have in the past) is a misplaced requirement too since Google can't verify a site's traffic, publishers are allowed to implement on as few/many pages as they'd like and low-traffic sites work just as well with Applied Semantics' algorithms as high-traffic sites since analysis is done on a per-page basis.
Enforced site quality requirements. Review of publishers' secondary sites before AdSense code can used on them. Those two alone would have a huge impact.
It's made from public domain articles.
I've seen a lot of new sites created to take advantage of AdSense in the industry of one client. And the sites are ALL just copies of information from federal government websites. It's public domain stuff, so they can copy it.
So there are a lot of sites with substantially the same words (with some variation in order and organization), and none of them will do well on the search engines. I don't know if the site owners think they are really going to build a business copying government information onto a website with AdSense ads.
...you'll be happy to know that we have an editorial team that will review each web publisher application. They check the content on the site and also use in-house technology to determine how popular a site is. So there will be reviews to make sure that a site is appropriate in the first place, and there will also be on-going monitoring to make sure that sites maintain the level of quality that we want to work with. It's going to be pretty exciting. :)
My guess is that the editorial team has been overwhelmed with the number of publishers and sites in the program along with support related issues. It's in Google's best long-term interests to maintain (or increase) the integrity of the site. If advertiser and user perception takes a dive because ads appear regularly on low-quality sites/pages and publishers try to manipulate the system in ways that are bad for advertisers it will be difficult for Google to recover. So I don't buy the philosophy that Google should maximize impressions and only take action when the brown stuff hits the fan. By then it will be too late.
Come on people...what happened to buyer beware? Adsense is an advertisers program....let them control it based on their ROI...(SNIP)...Until this issue hits them in the pocketbook, its hypothetical at best.
It isn't that simple. As we've discussed in other threads, not all advertisers are looking for immediate ROI. Traditional, mainstream advertisers who don't "make money on the turn" (to use Cornwall's phrase) are likely to paying for leads, and they're also used to having some control over where their ads appear.
David Ogilvy, one ofthe most successful ad men of the 20th Century, once said that "80% of advertising does nothing but run." And he was talking about an environment where advertisers did (and do) have control over their media schedules. If Google wants to make "content ad" believers out of Ogilvy's successors on Madison Avenue, it will need to give advertisers more choice and control than they have now.
If I am correct, even though the editors may well be deluged, they have corrective algorithms in place which serve to protect the advertiser - particularly those paying for high value ads - while they verify that a pubisher is providing good content.
and Google has no incentive to change things until the advertising base starts to decline.
Then do you disagree with what I said in Message #46 of this thread?
Europe...that's exactly my point. If advertisers are willing to pay for branding...then adsense makes sense right now...and the more publishers the better for them.
Actually, I was talking about lead generation, which is different from branding.
But you're right: Google will change the program only when it feels that it has to...as it inevitably will when a competitor like Overture gives advertisers more choices and control than Google does.
So cell phones became a necessary good. Now there are 4 wireless stores in every corner. Many of these shops used to be just a photo development shop, an appliances fixing shop, a grocery store. But now, the consumer wanted sell phones, so they started offering cell phone too. Them some of them saw that this was driving more revenue than the photo development.
Capuccino, Moca, Cafe Late in Bookstores? In schools? In grocery stores? In car dealers? I wonder why?
We can come up with many analogies.
I guess the difference in our views is that you think that Google won't be motivated to deal with this until their earnings drop and I believe that it's imperative that they deal with it better before then because in my opinion it may be too late at that point.
But it's ok to disagree. ;-)
What happens when the general public finds out that clicking on those ads makes money for the person that owns the site. Then those ads become voting buttons. I think there is alread some of that going on. That is why advertisers are getting such trash from those sites.
That may happen with community sites where word gets around and users want to show their support, but any such voting effect is likely to be shortlived for two reasons:
1) Google is capable of detecting unnatural clicking patterns. (How many "supporters" are going to be smart enough not to go click-click-click-click-click and trigger Google's fraud detector?)
2) Most users can't be bothered to click on ads day after day just to help a publisher or organization. (Let's face it: How many users click on banner ads to "show their support"?)
As for the claim that advertisers "are getting such trash for those sites," I don't know which sites you're referring to, but several advertisers on this forum (Chiyo and Shak come to mind) have reported success with AdSense content ads. And I'm sure that my topic isn't unique in attracting the same advertisers month after month. (If those advertisers were getting trash results from content ads, they would have bailed out on AdSense by now.)
I do agree that "trash" clicks are a potential problem, and they may be a problem now for certain topics (depending on the target audiences for the ads and where the ads are likely to appear). Where such problems occur, advertisers may very well bail out--which may be why publishers in some categories are reporting falling revenues, PSAs, etc. while publishers in other niches are continuing to see healthy revenues and advertiser loyalty.
I only display AdSense ads on the information side of the site and even then on only about 10% of the pages (which represent 40% of the page views for the information side of the site) - pages that I consider to be the best fit. I am careful not to mention the ads anywhere and any community discussion of them would be blocked. Call it paranoia, but I prefer to be cautious.
The community participants are the most likely to recognize that we are compensated for clicks and try to support us by clicking and at the same time they're the least likely to be interested in the ads due to ad blindness, the nature of the ads and their interests.
As more people become aware that publishers are compensated by the click I think trash clicks will become more of a problem. Unfortunately, educating users may be just as likely to cause enemies to attempt to get a publisher in trouble as it is to deter a user who thinks she is helping the publisher out.
So I'm trusting that Google will constantly improve their fraud detection and the economics of bid prices will naturally factor in fraudulent clicks and focus on ROI, just like brick and mortar retailers must factor in shrinkage, damage, etc.
I wish Google would allow me to track the ROI for clicks from individual sites. If that were the case, it would be possible to micromanage the bid amounts up to reward the quality sites.
Buys a round...and passes one to richmond...always refreshing in here that you can agree to disagree.
This thread is more generic than just Google. We could be talking Overture, Kanoodle, FindWhat, Espotting...etal
