Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I guess it's a good thing for the market (and of course for Google), but it does hurt some advertisers in the short term while probably benefits others.
I don't have any content sites, so I never tried to sign up with AdSense, but I get a feeling that the entry barrier is much lower than for many other networks. On top of that, fine-grained targeting also results in higher profit per pageview than with other networks.
Oh well, back to looking for affiliates... talk to you later :)
As a publisher, yes i have to admit that if the adsense model does work, i will be quite happy that content publisher's are getting more rewards for their development efforts over the past 6 or so years. If other competitors to Adsense come up and survive, we can expect that this change may become more substantial. Up to now, the real profits on the web for small players was in the affiliate arena.
However some publisher's may be foolhardy. To alienate other advertisers when the general feeling is that returns from Adsense will fall over time, is to me just not sensible.
I also think that the move to advertising on content sites, slowly increasing in the last 12 months, but given a bug push forward by Adsense will affect Affiliates as well, to the extent that running ads from ad servers is an alternative to running affiliate ads. Sensible publishers wont drop a revenue stream completely for a new upstart suitor, but it may well mean they reduce their use of them if Adsense and other ad servers are returning more per page view.
As an advertiser, we advertise in Adwords and OV and from various agreements with other sites and print publications. We hope to keep our ad-spend portfolio as diverse as possible, but at the moment ROI from our adwords in content sites seem to be relatively high. One alternative for you is to try adwords?
None of us know how it will pan out. But it is a classic marketplace, with buyers and sellers coming together (via Google and their cut) and a price being set.
If publishers get very rich, very quickly, then other publishers will join the market, and prices will fall, until its not worth anyone taking the ads
On the other hand, one assumes Google have done the sums and not only have more advertisers than they can currently satisfy directly off Search Engine ads, but also project an increase in advertising expenditure on the web to make the market place grow. On that scenario everyone prospers.
Bottom line is, I believe, that businesses willingness to advertise on the web will determine the sucess or otherwise of AdSense. But if Google had not done the research, then they would not be wasting the (presumably considerable) sum in setting up AdSense
To alienate other advertisers when the general feeling is that returns from Adsense will fall over time, is to me just not sensible.
Unless it's a super loyal publisher, I don't think anyone will stick around just to be nice.
One alternative for you is to try adwords?
So I don't even want to imagine what would happen if PPC became the only major source of commercial, targeted traffic, even if it's just for a short period of time like few years.
One possible scenario ... ad server networks become greedy in their margins and publisher and advertiser strike their own deals? - More possible for sites with large inventory and advertisers with large budgets.
Another... as ppc increases in costs, advertisers find it once again more economical to have their own selling site, online product-related magazine, and hire a SEO! (and add adsense for non-competitive advertisers who are slow on the uptake on the side ;))
Regarding your last paragraph, this is very much the way I see the commercial side of the internet working in future.
You have two sites, one content and one the shop. The content site is SEO'd and feeds traffic to the shop (for example product reviews with a "buy it now online" link at the bottom).
The content site can be supplemented with advertising for other sites not competing directly with the shop.
TJ
Unfortunately, they do stick around out of lethargy. I have no doubt that adsense payouts will fall. The commercial reality is that it takes a bigger inducement to get someone off his backside to post the code on his site in the first place. Google have achieved that by paying well. But if payouts fall in small amounts most webmasters will stick around till it goes so low that it makes sense to pull out. Even when it's about the same earnings as they would achieve with CJ or similar, publishers will stay with Adsense out of lethargy... if I'm not going to earn more, why move?
We've seen the same happen with vibrantmedia and similar programs following this strategy.
Google will maximise their profits by revising the payouts downwards till the point where they believe they would lose too many webmasters. Google won't keep the payouts high just to be nice.
I have only just noticed that my adwords CPC has increased this week, coincidence perhaps, or the richer advertisers are realising they can be on some very good sites for a fraction of what it would cost going direct which is normally not per click.
Lethary is one thing but after all with SSI it only takes a few minutes to remove the Google code from your pages, and OV are expected to launch something similar soon as well I believe which should at least keep pay outs reasonable.
It looks there already have two groups bonding with this new/fresh program.
One is "pure" content/e-business publishers who still focus on developing high-quality sites and/or doing e-business. Adsense would be a positive adding to their portforlio but not the only goal.
The other small group are some "scummers" enticed by Adsense's pay-rate. They "cooked" targeted sites to make the "easy" money. This would be the definite bad thing for this program. This could disappoint advertisers and damage Adsense's reputation and finally indirectly impact other decent publishers.
I am not sure how effective Google would cope with the second group but I am sure the CPC would be lowered as the first result of this battle.
In my opinion if some networks dont get off their rears and send payments in a timely fashion (Net-30 NOT Net-90) and quit running the punch the monkey style ads (can you get any less targeted?) they are going to be a memory. In essence, Adsense has given publishers additional leverage in dealings with ad networks.
I agree. The effective (net) CPM of adsense is within the range of my rate card (which is realisticly priced, not pumped-up --my banner customers are generally "self-serve"). In short, adsense is paying me what the space is worth.
To be more specific, I continue to make good money from affiliate programs that offer services of general interest to my readers: e.g., hotels, car bookings, rail passes, local sightseeing tours, and travel insurance. What AdSense lets me do is fill the gaps. In the past, an article on a Caviar Cruise (fictitious name) in the Mediterranean or a page of links for the Costa del Sol might not have produced any direct--or even indirect--income. From a business standpoint, such pages were loss leaders that helped to draw readers into the site. If I was lucky, the person who was interested in a Caviar Cruise might have booked a hotel through an affiliate merchant, or the reader who was interested in visiting the Costa del Sol might have clicked a car-rental or railpass affiliate link.
Now, with AdSense, I can make revenue directly from those "loss leader" pages--even if the reader who wants a Caviar Cruise has no interest in hotels, car rentals, or rail passes.
The ability to run AdWords on such pages is good for me--but just as important, it's also good for the advertiser, since the reader who's gone to the trouble of searching for and reading an article on Caviar Cruises is likely to be a hotter prospect than the reader who clicks casually on an AdWord in Google or requests information on Caviar Cruises after seeing a branding ad in TRAVEL & LEISURE.
Side note: Although I continue to work with affiliate programs, I'm now less interested in working with those that are marginal for my site. For example, I no longer have reason to consider working with an affiliate partner that books hotels in Belgium, because I don't get enough traffic on my Belgium pages to justify the labor required. It's far more efficient to let AdSense take care of that niche. Similarly, if I have an article on luggage that gets quite a bit of traffic, it may not be worth joining a luggage affiliate programjust to make a few bucks a month from that article. I'm likely to make just as much money (with no effort) by letting AdSense display luggage ads on that article's pages.
(BTW, please note the phrase "marginal for my site." A site that focuses entirely on Belgium might easily be able to justify a Belgian hotel partner, and a packing-related site like The Universal Packing List might be able to justify having a luggage affiliate partner. Every publisher needs to make his own decisions about when to use affiliate merchants and when to rely on AdSense.)
I gather from BT's re-write of the sub heading of this topic on the front page that he does not have a lot of faith in AdSense long term ;)
The split on views on the long term sustainability/profitability, as expressed in WebmasterWorld forums, seems to depend mainly on ones perspective.
I suspect that many of the knockers of AdSense are hoping that it will not suceed because their business plan rests on attracting punters to purchase indirectly. In other words, first attracting the punter to their site, then redirecting the punter to an affiliate site
AdSense give the punter a different route to the buying decision, cutting out those sorts of sites. What attracted me to AdSense in the first place was that I have been increasingly running into problems getting decent results from Google when I want to buy something.
Try to find a hotel in London, contemporary furniture or whatever, and you face an uphill struggle with a mass of well targeted sites aimed at making money, but of little use to the searcher. If you do not believe me try to find a hotel in London on Google
AdSense is a clever way of having another go at getting the punter to their goal. I think it will work, but how much money publishers will make in the long run depends on market forces. Those market forces will (probably) be the large amrketing companies. How they choose to spend their money in the long term is in the lap of the gods (or the devil himself)
The Se world is always changing, as I have said elsewhere, I am not giving up either the day job or the night job for AdSense, but I am probablly 4 weeks away from giving up the night job, and putting more effort into Adsense.
Google must believe that it has a (better than) sporting chance of suceeding
That said, I don't think Adsense is going to dry up, and I don't think Overture and the others believe so either, which is why they're jumping in to the same marketspace.
In my opinion, affiliate programs and most CPM networks take advantage of over-enthusiastic webmasters, like shovel-sellers in the Gold Rush. They've had a good ride with fat profits, but it's time for them to start paying a realistic amount for the traffic they receive. And with its targeting, Adsense connects extremely targeted advertisers and publishers together in a way that saves time for both parties.
It's all good. Welcome to the future... I hope.
The home page blurb (by Brett I am guessing as the other member mentioned) certainly does NOT reflect reality: bigger corporate size budgets are only slowly being aligned with the web, and Google's Adsense product gives a corporate budget the ability to leverage a mass of eyeballs with one media buy which is plain huge.
Sure, you can do the same with DoubleClick, etc - but the rates, the disparity, etc - made it a ludicrous proposition for the publisher. Now, the revenue seems (from what I'm hearing) to be more equitable to the network and the publisher, which is critical for long term publisher happiness.
It was that disparity that first drove the "affiliate" gold rush, because talented folks with great sites & tons of quality traffic, could NOT get an effective or reasonable CPM for their site from one of the traditional avenues of monetization. Now the tables have gone the other way, yes, Adsense revenue for the publisher may go down long term, however by then, a lot of the other ad networks will be history, imho.
What's even more important for the publisher in this case, is that it allows them a level of control that they don't get with affiliate programs -> thus, a merchant and / or advertiser has a whole new ball game to contend with. Reasonable rates, etc - even with an "expensive" internet buy through a direct deal or a network, as long as you are tracking your results, it is still night & day between the internet options & offline advertising.
*That* is where the bulk of the big money still lies, in the "offline" world. As more of that is siphoned away by the internet, you can bet your shirt that the general cost per click for advertisers will rise and (one hopes) the revenue for publishers as well ;)
What is different here is the amazing accuracy of the targetted ads. It is like conducting a search for X and visiting a site which has Adsense, the ads are like taking the search with you, so if you do not find what you are looking for on X site you can click on highly relevant ads that 90% of the time are on the topic you were looking for in the first place.
I have only added Adsense to one site for around 24 hours now and am amazed at how accurate and interesting the ads are. For this reason we should not compare it to past models.
I was a little hesitant to add the adsense campaign because I was afraid that it would eat into my amazon earnings - however for the time I've been in the program, my amazon earnings have stayed at their usual average, and Adsense is earning about 25% more daily than Amazon.
Now I am seriously considering adding the adsense code to my travel destination site - my site and my clients' sites dominate the SERPs - resulting in a pretty big pool of adwords advertisers who can't get top 20 ranking for their keywords....
It would be kind of ironic to advertise my competitors on my site -- but hey if I end up earning the annual ad fee on a monthly basis....
Here's what will happen with Adsense, guaranteed.
It's called "blind spot" and already happening with the more frequent users. I go to google, or any other site who uses Adsense, and I don't see their ads. I programmed my mind to block them.
I don't notice most of the ads in the newspapers and magazines that I subscribe, too, either. (At least, not consciously.) And if you were to ask me what "junk mail" showed up in my mailbox today, I probably couldn't tell you. That doesn't mean advertising and direct mail don't work, however. They do--and between them, they're a multibillion-dollar industry.
The other small group are some "scummers" enticed by Adsense's pay-rate. They "cooked" targeted sites to make the "easy" money. This would be the definite bad thing for this program. This could disappoint advertisers and damage Adsense's reputation and finally indirectly impact other decent publishers.
In short, adsense is paying me what the space is worth.
In the past, an article on a Caviar Cruise (fictitious name)
I would think that direct sales will always bring in more money. Adsense though takes away many issues such as sales staff, expenses, management of ads etc. etc. so in view of that it is only natural to receive less than you would by going directly.
If you use Adsense as an additional ad revenue stream and still maintain sales staff etc then the decision has to be whether that space could have been sold for more or not or whether there are other benefits to your site by using it.
It's easier for me to be "firmer" with advertisers and say "well, if you don't book the space now
Yey! That was exactly my point when I started this thread.
We can all go home now. Thank you guys :)
The other small group are some "scummers" enticed by Adsense's pay-rate. They "cooked" targeted sites to make the "easy" money. This would be the definite bad thing for this program. This could disappoint advertisers and damage Adsense's reputation and finally indirectly impact other decent publishers.
The question is, can such opportunistic, get-rich-quick sites generate enough traffic to make significant income on a continuing basis when their AdSense accounts can be cancelled by Google on a moment's notice?
Best Regards
If those "doorway" sites are cancelled or not, that doesnīt matter to the advertiser. If they do get busted, the only problem is for the publisher. So it really doesnīt matter much...
So:
- As an advertiser I donīt mind them.
- As a publisher, even if I had such a site, and it went cancelled, well thatīs life. I would turn to another thing.
So not a big deal. And I know Google thought of this. When the first ppc affiliate search boxes appeared, wasnīt there a similar doubt?
And when the first top keywords feeds appeared? I think those are far worse (and I donīt like them), because itīs easy to select the highest unrelated bids and put them on a pop up, popping from unrelated sites, unlike these AdSense doorway pages.
Overture keywords are appearing on parked domains (feeded by Oingoīs partners). Isnīt that far worse than AdSense targeted doorway pages?
Yup, that's it - corporate budgets. I assume that is what is in it for Google in the long term. For example...
Some hotels chains like Holiday Inn already offer "lowest price on direct booking" policy, bypassing affiliates, and are switching to direct web advertising. One can just see the effect if all the major hotel chains target punters looking for information on anywhere from Barmouth Harbor, Maine to Downtown San Francisco to Bangkok.
Whether that is how it pans out is anybody's guess, but on what I have seen so far, it appears to be the next great leap forward!
