Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've never heard of this. Is it even legal? What happens if, or should I say when someone decides to fraudulently increase clicks on their pages?
[code.google.com...]
I intended to pay contributors an 80% share of the earnings from the advertising around their article - for that to work without a problem, they would have to be ignorant of the CPC model and how it works.
But sooner or later word would get out, right? And once word was out you could stand to have your account sabotaged (likely through greed rather than malice).
The Google API Flexible Revenue Share Program might be a way around this. If I understand it correctly, you ought to be able to get article contributors to create their own AdSense account to display alongside their articles. Any subsequent sabotage would only affect their account and not yours.
The downside is, I suppose they (and all their friends) will know that all the other Google ads on your site operate on a CPC model. (Usually, if pressed I only tell friends and relatives about CPM and CPA models... I have never thought it a good idea to inform people about how CPC works).
The rep told me that there are a few forums that rotate publisher ID's on the pages with the ID's of the thread starters, and they share revenue in that way. This seems too easy to sabatoge, but the rep told me that if there were invalid clicks they would be against the account, not the domain, so I should be safe. He then told me that I should email the AdSense team to get their approval in writing before I try to implement this system.
I emailed them, and got a response saying it was fine, but when I started talking about it with some of my users, a few of them freaked out and said that it was against the TOS, and sure enough, the TOS sure reads like it would be prohibited, so we chickened out and abandoned the idea.
Because of this thread I've started looking into the API. I think it would work well for what we want to do. I'll keep you posted.
I would not open it up to all posters without using the API, but some fora have done it with no problems so far. While there is a lot of FUD about how you are sure to get your account canceled, I have yet to see an example of this happening with a revenue sharing site. Even so, I'm still careful.
(I am quite happy that Google gets to handle the payments to contributors, not me. *grin*)
Adsense assures me that invalid clicks will be counted against the account, not the site, unless I'm somehow promoting the click fraud.
In my implementation, I will also be working with a small pool of writers who are largely writing for the love of the subject(s), not the money. 'Cause it isn't enough to get rich on. They do have to submit an application and be approved. And I'm picky.
If they click their own ads, they will face the Wrath of Me possibly before they face the Wrath of Google -- and most, if not all of them, would be a lot more upset about being kicked off my site than they would be about getting banned from Google. And I know many of them IRL, or we at least travel in the same circles and we know each other by reputation. Some of them also have adsense accounts of their own for their own blogs and sites. And many have reputations and are well known in real life -- people highly unlikely to commit fraud for a few bucks.
With a different demographic ... it'd be a lot more difficult to police and I might have more concerns.
Leva
