Forum Moderators: martinibuster
If a spammer can build a site with 100K pages on <a given keyword> and fill it with Adsense, then buy cheaper relevant Adwords to bring in the traffic, at which point the surfer finds no content and clicks thru.
Is the entire concept not heading for being seriously, internationally, terminally discredited?
Finally is anyone *actually really genuinely* making money from this and not just 10,000,000 tiny operators taking $10 a day?
[edited by: jatar_k at 8:42 pm (utc) on May 12, 2006]
[edit reason] no specific terms thanks [/edit]
is anyone *actually really genuinely* making money
Sure. If you don't want to believe it, that's your choice.
Finally is anyone *actually really genuinely* making money from this and not just 10,000,000 tiny operators taking $10 a day?
Yes, actually. Adsense replaces my wife's job currently. Not bad bearing in mind my intention in starting advertising was to pay for the site's webhosting.
is anyone *actually really genuinely* making money from this
Nah, don't believe 'em, its mostly fake.
I've tried AdSense for two years now.... very low earnings...hehehe
:-)
/P3
Surprisingly, very few of the leading sites in my field use adsense. I was looking to do some advertising in said field using a banner through adwords. When looking at the sites available to publish my banner on, the selection was really quite poor.
This is consistent with my experience in this sense - I've made alot more money through direct relationships with advertisers than through adsense, I guess thats why these bigger fish in my field are not using adsense.
I love the adsense program and still have big hopes for it. I should ad though that the adwords content network has not delivered for me in my ad campaigns recently, and I'm afraid this is probably due to poor quality MFA sites and fraud.
Better to go invest in a few lollipops, at least you can eat them.
Ann
It's time you find another job! hahahhhahahahahahah
hooooo
heeeee
There really is no such thing as Google AdSense! This is a spoof message board!
Is the entire concept not heading for being seriously, internationally, terminally discredited?
Jolly japes and general scoffing aside, the op does have a valid point here. Look at it from the surfers point of view.
Surfer arrives fresh from the planet Zog and is told to go onto Google for information. They do a search for something they need information on. The ads come up on the right of the screen. Surfer clicks on a few to find more information / products related to the search. Finds loads of sites that have nothing but lists of other sites, so clicks on one or two hoping for more information, and finds yet more sites containing lists of other sites.
How many times is the surfer going to go through this cycle before they realise that all Google ads are useless and no longer click them? People learn to not click the spammy ads.
I know it's hard for us cyber-types, but just try this. Get of the chair, leave the computer and go out into the real world. No, you won't need a life support system connected to cyberspace :) When outside, find some real people who don't live in cyberspace and talk to them about searching on Google and their views on the ads, and if they click them at all.
I like having ads on search pages, and relevant ads on information sites. It's a great idea and when the ads are relevant and genuine it really does save time and effort in finding goods / services I want to buy. However, people are beginning to regard Google ads as pure spam, so the OP does have a point that they are becoming discredited.
Yes, I know there are arguments that people don't even know they are clicking ads but I don't entirely buy into that. There are some net newbies, and some really stupid people, but the vast majority of people aren't that stupid and do know they are clicking on Google ads, and are learning not to bother as they know what they will find.
I guess Google are aware of this emerging learned behavious pattern, but at the moment don't think it's the right time to resolve the problem that the vast majority of ads are useless. At some point they will have to address the issue to stay alive, and hopefully it won't be too late. Still, we can always migrate to the new order, whereas a lot of Google employees will be asking "Do you want fries with that" in their next job.
[edited by: david_uk at 6:41 am (utc) on May 13, 2006]
A good start would be to let us have more than 200 entries for competitive-Ad blocks.
I've only just been in AdSense for two months now and I don't have a very 'popular' topic but I've already filled up at least 100 entries with MFA sites. MFA's are really annoying, I wish I could report/flag them somehow other than just putting them into the Ad filter. After a client clicks through to more than 2 MFA's I imagine they'd just plain give up on clicking on adverts.
I've just gone and looked at one of my pages only to see that google has given me a bunch of utterly irrelevant adverts despite having perfect adverts all during last week *sigh*.
At one time direct mail worked, later TV Ads. worked, recently the Net is the big draw.
The World has largely failed us, we need to look at the virtual World to achive our desires. Search engines control that market, hence those scary share prices.
5 years ago I had stats that proved that less than 5% of people clicked on Ads. Today it is a whole different story!
>Adsense is doomed?
NO way, it is part of the next 5 year growth plan, after that is might suffer, but we should all move with the times!
There's no reason to add it to a profitable subscription business model.
If your site is not delivering the content (or designed NOT to deliver it) the surfer thought he was getting and needs to click ads to fullfill it, what's your point?
You can't fool all of the people all of the time, remember?
Therefore this business model has future failure built-in.
My site is a well respected authority in my niche, and over the years I've found that properly targeted ads from genuine suppliers do really, really well. So in my mind Adsense as an idea works. It works very well in practice, but as with every venture it takes a bit of tweaking to get the best out of it. But it can't be said that it doesn't work.
Until they get REALLY severe and begin manually checking EVERY site that carries Adsense, the value will decrease steadily.
If a caller comes to my door and I send them away after only making the average $0.09 sale, I'd be pretty pissed with my sales team.
If I can build an Adsense site today with my competitors money (and I can) it is ultimately doomed in it's current form.
We then have the real control in our hands to really block MFA or spam ads. That will be a really effective tool to curtail MFA's.
No offense, and said with great respect for your opinion, and feel free to disagree with me, but... I find that statement and similar sentiments to be mistaken about the role publishers play in the Google AdSense forum.
I'm not defending so-called MFAs, I'm only considering this issue from a rational and logical standpoint and sharing my conclusions.
1:It's Google's business, not yours
There is not one logical reason to hand over the keys to their business to a faceless horde of publishers and allow them to manipulate the AdSense program as they see fit. Google has sophisticated algorithms to do this and have always leaned toward applying scalable automated solutions that are under their strict control.
There is only one Captain of the ship, and it's Google. Afaik, the Google AdSense program does not surrender control of any part of it's operations to an outside party. In fact, if you think about it rationally and in a dispassionate manner, no reasonable business would ever surrender control of a vital portion of it's business to masses of strangers.
2:It's a Competitive Ad Filter [google.com]
The filter is for blocking websites that may be in competition with you. Although it's also handy for blocking irrelevant or inappropriate ads, I doubt it was ever Google's intention to allow users to weed out low CPC ads.
The notion of empowerment is erroneous on those two points.
Is AdSense Doomed?
If AdSense is ever doomed, it will be when they stop using algorithms and allow untrained and self-interested publishers to make the decisions of what ads are shown.
