Forum Moderators: martinibuster
In many ways this is going back to the 'old way' of doing things but I have some major problems with AdSense which makes me very uncomfortable about using them any longer:
1) Click Fraud - Always the potential of being turned off due to click fraud. I've never seen anything odd in my stats but having this potential looming and Google's poor response times to dealing with people who have suspended accounts is not a secure business model.
2) Random earnings - Every day is like a lottery. Earnings rarely have anything to do with traffic levels or even the number of clicks. If I invest in traffic it has no guarantee of a return.
3) Relationship - Google seems to be getting worse and worse at dealing with questions, complaints and account queries. Having an important business relationship which is operated at arm's length doesn't do much for long term development.
Moving to a CPM only model makes more sense for me at this time. Despite having over 5% CTR with AdSense, earnings change daily as much as double / half the previous day - and this is a high traffic website.
So, despite Google's AdSense giving me the incentive to build more pages, market my website and probably get it to the position it is today, the relationship will go no further.
A switch to CPM earnings will mean average monthly income from advertising will increase between 2 and 30 times. I also have a more secure business relationship where I know that if anything strange happens I will get a phone call to help sort it out, not an automatic email saying my account has been suspended.
Anyway, that's my position. Thanks AdSense, but see ya...
It might not be as good but I won't be down for the count.
I can always sleep at night having both.
we just had a thread out here where somebody got banned by adsense, and had to use the back-door phone number to get re-instated, because the appeal process failed.
in light of that google incompetence, the fear of getting banned for no reason is a legitimate concern.
Always legitimate, yes, given that G can never be perfect, but the issue at stake is the probability of erroneous ban * the money lost by such a ban, or, in market terms the PV (Present Value) of the risk of being banned wrongly.
If the $ number you come up with is small enough for you to be able to loose it without going bust, then you should probably (a) not worry about it but (b) always take easy steps to keep it as small as possible.
This is nominally the most rational way of dealing with non-catastrophic risks. The rest you should insure against, avoid entirely, or ignore.
Rgds
Damon
[edited by: DamonHD at 4:37 pm (utc) on Sep. 7, 2006]
in light of that google incompetence, the fear of getting banned for no reason is a legitimate concern.
Police also arrest the wrong people, bust down the wrong doors, pizza gets delivered to the wrong address.
I'm not sure it would need to be a "concern" for the majority of adsense publishers unless it was proven to be a very frequent occurence of error (which we may never know).
Not something to lose sleep over or make me dump adsense altogether.
But everyone's different and what may not seem like a big deal to me, could make someone else very nervous :)
or perhaps they would feel better if google wasn't hiding that back-door phone number from it's publishers?
at any rate, you shouldn't depend on only one ad network... a couple of months ago ypn banned some accounts with the excuse that they weren't converting very well.
