Forum Moderators: martinibuster
For this day (17 May), does it mean that they will pay for April 1-30 earnings, or for May (1-18) also?
I think for many of us, it's the accumulated frustration of how long it took for this to happen. Watching the errosion of the AdSense brand, the exodus of advertisers from the content network and the plummeting price per click since joining AdSense in 2004 hasn't helped my blood pressure any.
However, I think regular publisher would profit from this cleanup and CPM could rise significantly after this.
The point I learned is :
Dont treat adsense as your primary earning source. It may become the primary source, but you dont treat it that way.
cheap domain name : $1.99
Scrapped content : few minutes
cheap adwords campaign : $0.03/click
getting banned from adsense: priceless
or is it? when u made enough already (like $70,000 p.m. for a year or so.)?
I think regular publisher[s] would profit from this cleanup and CPM could rise significantly after this.
Maybe, maybe not. I predict the changes could be radically different from one site to another. Some sites will do much better; others will do far worse; while others won't see any appreciable difference.
Why? Once again it's inventory. Depending on your industry, market, and niche, if any, as well as traffic, Google may or may not be able to fill the void left by the departing arbit. inventory.
We don't know how many total arbit. accounts are being banned, and whether the remaining accounts will collectively have budgets high enough to run ads which fill the available ad space every day.
The sites which had tons of arbit. folks could see a huge drop in earnings, assuming the reason why the arbit webmasters dominated is because there were so few other honest businesses on the Content Network. The Adsensers will feel the rug pulled out from under them.
I personally don't see Advertisers rushing back to the Content Network. I don't think the main reason they left is because of other advertisers; I think it's because the publishers couldn't format their sites in a way that brought them conversions.
Furthermore, the loss of competition from arbit. webmasters has to lower the bidding, leading to lower earnings. Maybe not a lot less, but expect a drop, nevertheless.
I'm interested to see how or if this new development affects smart pricing. Based on the idea that Google's sp algo could assume few real conversions took place if many clicks are made on one ad unit. Obviously arbit sites led to multiple clicks (different ads) from the same ad unit or webpage, when the visitors realized a site was junk, hit the back button, and proceeded to try another Adsense ad link.
Remove all those bogus ads, then, by this new purge, and you could climb out of being under the smart pricing cloud. In the past I think arbiters have been partially responsible for getting us smart priced and earning less revenue.
A little spring cleaning could be a very good thing for everyone who wants to make an honest buck. And I guess if it doesn't go as Google planned, it can always go back and revert... doubt the old arbiters will hesitate to join the program again later... the 70K/mo boys and all. :-P
p/g
I am sure, there is something different viewable in the Google Analytics data.
This differences could be in
page views per visitors
visit length
pattern of repeated visitors
Let's discuss a hypothesis
page vies per visitor < 1.5
visit lenght < 30 seconds
repeated visitors < 2%
could be critical parameters
(I'm being cynical btw. 'Clean up' MFA's while still running domain landing pages? How hypocritical is that? FWIW, I've got a friend who loves MFA's. His customers call him and tell him they see his ads everywhere - great for branding. I disagree, but that's free market.)
I suspect that there are three (or more) reasons why Google waited as long as it did to take this action.
First, MFA's and arbitrage have helped it maintain a sufficient population of publishers to distribute its ad inventory. I think it is likely that they have "done the math" and find that they have enough publishers in the program to distribute that inventory even after the arbitrage sites are excluded.
Second, I suspect that successful arbitrage sites have provided Google with a wealth of information for both AdSense and AdWords, about which keywords work for advertisers and about effective contextual matching for publishers. With sites using AdWords to drive AdSense, they know what ad led to an arbitrage page, they know what ad was clicked on the arbitrage page, and to some degree (depending on how the term is defined) they know which of those ads "converted". This helps them better suggest keywords and phrases to other advertisers, and helps them better match ads to websites ("This is what our algorithm thought matched; but as it turns out, this other ad from the arbitrage site was what the user actually wanted.") Whatever else people may think of arbitrage sites, this would be very valuable data.
Third, it is reasonable to infer that Google sees arbitrage as having a negative effect on its future revenues through AdWords and AdSense. Even if you accept that an arbitrage site's ad converts well, there is no reason why the same ad wouldn't perform just as well if it were presented in the SERPs or on the site which presented the arbitrager's ads. Whatever happens with publishers, and I supsect most will benefit from this change, this will take some money out of Google's own pocket for a while unless it expands its pool of advertisers or restores sufficient confidence that bids go up significantly.
