Forum Moderators: martinibuster
- People are setting up arbitrage sites, and more and more sites ARE actually arbitrage sites.
- We can safely assume that all arbitrage opportunities will eventually be filled.
Arbitrage sites will always be able to have higher click through rates that general merchants.
Arbitrage sites and arbitrage ads will thus force out other merchants.
- The volume of supply for adspace will continue to go up dramatically as people like us come up with ideas (anyone planning on serving fewer pages next year folks?); however the volume of demand will eventually reach a saturation point (it has already in markets like webhosting).
Arbitrage site 10BestBlueWidgets.Com will pretty much always attract more clicks through than BlueWidgetX.Com and rise to the top in AdWords.
Arbitragers will go to the highest paying ad networks. This will be partly on the Yahoo network where the minimum price per click is 10 cent.
You as a publisher may make say 6 cent on that click 10 cent click.
Say you buy traffic on Google to get those clicks. The most you can possibly hope for is 30-40-50% click through rate on this traffic. Say 50%, that means you can pay Google 3 cent for that click. The publisher for that click will get 60% or 1,8 cent for that click. In reality its more like 10-20% click through rate for arbitrage sites and 1 cent or less for the publisher.
This is happening in front of our eyes as we speak. More and more niches are entering into this “race to the bottom”. Many will meet at the bottom of the barrel at the 1 cent minimum. Be warned.
200,000 to 400,000 rank. It doesn't take many of them to overwhelm my little site which is at 100,000 currently.
I agree that a quality score might be a solution.
BUT, it should somehow be possible for newcommers to break in. If the quality score rules are to strict from day one the newbies will never enter.
You remember your own stuff a while back, when you first broke in to the ads game - it was crap and would have been dismissed by the quality team. YOU would never have been where you are today...
I myself started out with some weird stuff, then the increase in income DEFINITELY professionalized my stuff and gotten me to get my act together. Yet it was probably the easy entry that made it possible to get in in the first place.
And there's no sign of advertisers caring what kind of site they are seen on
The day Google lets me choose and individually bid for position on websites for PPC text ads, you will see plenty of sign that advertisers care what kind of site they are seen on.
Of course, that day will also be a death knell for most tiny publishers (which is to say, most AdSense publishers), so it's probably not coming any day soon.
I agree that a quality score might be a solution.
BUT, it should somehow be possible for newcommers to break in. If the quality score rules are to strict from day one the newbies will never enter.
People were developing intrinsically useful Web sites long before AdSense arrived on the scene. If anything, a quality score--or even an AdSense equivalent of the so-called Google Search "sandbox"--might help to improve the network's quality and value for advertisers by discouraging the get-rich-quick, if-it's-Tuesday-I've-got-launch-another-hundred-domains crowd.
You remember your own stuff a while back, when you first broke in to the ads game - it was crap and would have been dismissed by the quality team. YOU would never have been where you are today...
Again, the Web existed before AdSense came along, and so did many sites that are carrying AdSense ads today.
In any case, why should advertisers be expected to subsidize a new Web publisher's learning curve? If Joe Newbie is publishing crap, he shouldn't be accepted by the AdSense network until after he's started to deliver value to users and advertisers.
The day Google lets me choose and individually bid for position on websites for PPC text ads, you will see plenty of sign that advertisers care what kind of site they are seen on. Of course, that day will also be a death knell for most tiny publishers (which is to say, most AdSense publishers), so it's probably not coming any day soon.
Maybe not, but maybe yes. Consider:
- The U.S. advertising market currently totals some $177 billion per year. Google's AdSense partners (including big media, not just mom-and-pop publishers) are collectively generating less than 0.5% of that total. In the overall scheme of things, Google's AdSense network is barely a blip on the radar screen. If Google wants to reach the larger advertising marketplace, it needs to move beyond AdSense 1.x's one-size-fits-all, advertiser-take-potluck model.
- Segmenting the "content network" in various ways that have been discussed here wouldn't necessarily kill off small publishers. In other media (from TV to magazines to rented mailing lists), there are many quality/pricing tiers, and some advertisers buy ads in THE ROBB REPORT or rent upscale ZIP-code addresses from VANITY FAIR while others buy ads in the bulk-mail "occupant" flyers that show up in your mailbox. There will always be a place for low-cost ads that deliver positive ROI for advertisers. What doesn't exist now--and what needs to exist--is a place for mainstream advertisers and ad agencies that aren't willing to spin the roulette wheel or compromise their brand reputations with a lowest-common-denominator ad network. That would expand the pool of advertisers, which ultimately would be good news for the constantly growing pool of AdSense publishers.
(Disclaimer: I think there will be an AdSense publisher shakeout at some point, but it won't necessarily be based on publisher size, and small niche AdSense publishers who deliver value to advertisers may be able to prosper just as small niche publishers do in the offline world.)
I myself started out with some weird stuff, then the increase in income DEFINITELY professionalized my stuff and gotten me to get my act together. Yet it was probably the easy entry that made it possible to get in in the first place.
Most businesses are like this. Low cost/barriers to entry and lack of competition make it possible for people to learn and experiment. Some succeed. It's much harder for established, highly competitive marketplaces, which AdSense is becoming.
