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?
Less MFAs = less Adwords revenue = less Google profit. This decision must have resulted in serious fights over at The Plex.
Not necessarily. The proliferation of arbit. sites is to dilute the Adsense brand and compromise the expectations of any ads for everyone. The public's loss of confidence in Google ads leads to fewer clicks and less revenue.
It doesn't happen overnight, but confidence gradually erodes, and eventually people not only don't click the ads, they don't even read them. After their time was wasted on so many previous occasions, they aren't interested.
Google's market dominance, stock price, etc., put it in a position where the king is comfortable making this radical change now.
One development that will follow which I'll enjoy is less spam sites. The SERPs will be purged gradually of junk arbit spots.
For those who've been making money off arbit, if you're honest with yourselves, you must have known you built your business on sand, and guessed this time of hard rains would eventually come and wash it all away.
Enjoy the money you made, but move on to something else more useful and of higher quality online which doesn't waste the public's time and doesn't dilute anyone's brand.
Good luck,
p/g
Less MFAs = less Adwords revenue = less Google profit. This decision must have resulted in serious fights over at The Plex.
MFAs earns from Adsense more than they spend on Adwords. They are working as a middleman and reducing profits both for Google and for other webmasters. Google wants Google to be the middleman, not MFAs.
MFAs earns from AdSense more than they spend on AdWords. They are working as a middleman and reducing profits both for Google and for other webmasters. Google wants Google to be the middleman, not MFAs.
I suspected that as soon as they started interfering with google's bottom line they would be dealt with.
Ann
Not necessarily. The proliferation of arbit. sites is to dilute the Adsense brand and compromise the expectations of any ads for everyone. The public's loss of confidence in Google ads leads to fewer clicks and less revenue.
That's the reason why I have 177 URLs in my filter list
I feared the 200 limit of the URL filter list.
But with this actions, there is hope that the 200 limit of the filter list will be enough.
For those who've been making money off arbit, if you're honest with yourselves, you must have known you built your business on sand, and guessed this time of hard rains would eventually come and wash it all away
Well said, and very true. If you couldn't at least see the risk then you obviously weren't giving your business model a fair assessment or looking realistically at it's prospects for long term survival. It's a gray area - no doubt. Fortunately, for you anyway, Google considers it a gray area too, or did anyway. The fact that they're not only giving you notice but your money as well is evidence of that.
Personally speaking, if I had been making piles of cash (as opposed to the small trickle I actually make) from an operation that I knew was in that gray area, I would have been stashing most of it away in the bank. Several banks even...
You guys did save some money, right?
I also assume that arbitration is not bad as such, it can be a refinement of traffic, arbritation can create a good user experience. Business.com and Yellowpages.com are also doing arbritation to some extent.
It's interesting to see that there are several other Webmasters experiencing the same thing, getting the same canned email (thanks for making yourself known). At first I thought this was a problem specific to my sites, I now believe this is a larger thing from Google.
This changes how one can possibly deal with it.
That way you would have to submit a site - prior to being accepted into adsense. The code would be specific for that site - and non transferable.
That way - and I know there would be ways to fiddle the system - but at least a bulk of people would have to start witha legit site - which Google has approved as suitable for adsense. A lot of the sites with a page with nothing but ads would simply never have existed. IMHO
It would also in a way, give legitimate publishers, some form of security. Their site has been vetted by adsense - adsense is happy with them serving ads and that they are not in breach of TOS.
Perhaps there should be an annual renewal process - to eliminate at least one loophole that I can think of. That way - there is an incentive to keep the site quality up - and to eliminate the no-hopers who plague the net with empty, useless sites.
As stated above - I empathize with those who have lost their accounts, and hope that they find new and better ways in which to earn a living. I do think that if it was site specific - it would be better - and would encourage people to build good, unique sites.
Good for new blood but your returnees are tired of them and develop ad blindness.
Ann
but kudos to the involved webmasters who speak out honestly - they seem to spring up like mushrooms just now ;)
what i don't understand, why should this be a grey area?
google tos: "No Google ad may be placed on any non-content-based pages."
and further: "No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant."
although this may sound deliberately a bit unclear, at least in the case of mfa arbitrage sites it's a no-brainer that they infringe this rule.
