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?
[offtopic]
sorry, but adlinks is certainly the same rubbish as mfa arbi sites.
AdLinks may or may not be rubbish (I'm not a fan of them myself), but they aren't "the same rubbish" as mfa arbitrage sites. Why? Because users don't click on AdLinks in the expectation of finding real Web sites--or, if they do, they learn immediately that the AdLinks format leads to a page of ads, and they don't make the mistake of clicking on a list of AdLinks again.
Arbitrageurs' ads are something different: They're indistinguishable from legitimate ads that lead to real Web sites. The one thing they have in common with AdLinks is that they may educate users to ignore an ad format that results in dissatisfaction--which, in the case of AdSense ads (not AdLinks), has the potential to reduce clickthrough rates and earnings for the network as a whole.
sorry, but adlinks is certainly the same rubbish as mfa arbi sites
1) Adlinks are optional, or to put it another way, they are opt-in, whereas MFA appeared regardless of the publishers intent. In fact, many arbitrage players deliberately created more websites than there were slots in the competitive ad filter;
2) they are a way of connecting publishers to relevant advertisers when there's no obvious match;
3) they do not introduce a new player that wants a cut. It's still just between the original parties: Google, the publisher, the advertiser. Nobody else. How those three parties cut up the pie is sorted out between those three parties.
Therefore, Google's intent becomes clear. It is to remove the fourth party that intrudes into the transaction via a fake website.
(actually "dummy website" would probably be a better term, because it really exists, but it exists merely as an instrument to divert funds).
This siphoning of funds was draining the internet economy by inflating advertiser costs, reducing publisher costs, and diverting visitors away from topics they were interested in and toward high-revenue topics, regardless of the user's interest or intent to buy.
[edited by: callivert at 1:46 am (utc) on May 25, 2007]
So therefore, the part about arb's business model isn't a fit with AdSense must have nothing to do with "user experience". So it MUST be something else, unless G is being evil in not eliminating AdLinks.
I think it has a lot to do with user experience.
But I agree with EFV that the topic is for another thread, not this one - especially considering the current length of this thread.
Start a new thread and I'll explain if you're interested.
FarmBoy
I think you hit the nail right on the head once a user sees that AdLinks are what they are they will choose to go there or not. Regular AdWords though it is a crapshoot if you get sent to a MFA site or another kind of site. Arbitrage MFA was diluting the Google brand and that was not good for Google.
As for a pure MFA arbitrage site it has been really hard to do for the past few months and still keep your margins healthy smart pricing and AdWords landing page quality scores really made it tough. What it forced arbitragers to do was improve the content a lot so that they could pay less on the Adwords side. However you could have a lower quality MFA page and still get good returns but only via organic traffic. For example I had some old pages that were costing 12 bucks a click (so of course I never used them) however on the organic side they were very profitable because they were older and the search engine and the MediaPartners bot liked them. When the AdWords quality page assessment tool moves over to the Mediaparteners bot and rolls through the rest of the organic sites I think the next wave that will come is the lower quality sites are going to see a whole new smart pricing come around. Because it was easy for an arbitrageur to see what Google thought of your content they have that figured out now they are going to apply the same logic to regular Publishers if you have less quality content then you dont get paid much good quality content then you do get paid well. Some people may not try as hard to rank well organically for a site if at the end of the day you are smart priced so much that you dont make any money.
Google is doing a house cleaning and it will work really well. Google needs to protect the Google brand name first and foremost and when they do that they are also helping to clean up the Internet.
Actually that is a cool strategy let a bunch of publishers in grow that side of the house really big and then clean house and get rid of the lower quality sites. Still lots of properties for advertisers to advertise on and Google cannot be blamed or associated with lower quality websites. Kind of like panning for Internet gold dump in a ton of aggregate and in the end you get more gold then if you only threw in a shovel. Now they have a lot of publishers so they can let the poor performing ones or the low quality ones leave now hence the nice hug goodbye for us arbitragers hmmm.
I think it is going to be an interesting summer.
[edited by: need2bdiscreet at 2:20 am (utc) on May 25, 2007]
zett said:
all I care about is user experience. User experience is king, because I want them to return. Tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. If they click on one, two MFA ads, they will (in part) link that to my site. Will they return? Will they tell their friends? Will they recommend my site?Again, if you'd read this forum carefully, you'd see that this money was not appreciated by all the members here. There were at least some members who would have rather rejected your money (in return for seeing less crap on their sites). And yes, I was one of them. :-)
About 8 months ago I got rid of adlinks on a newer sub-site of mine because the visitors to that area were a lot less web savvy than visitors to my other sites. The site was suddenly getting many newbie visitors---new to the Internet, only visiting because of an article they read offline--- because it was featured in a popular off-line magazine in my niche(non-tech related). I felt that these particular visitors would be confused by adlinks so I discontinued them. I lost 100s of dollars a month initially by doing this. But, in the long run it was worth it, in my opinion. My point is, it isn't always about the money you can make immediately.
Sorry, sailorjwd, about my "holier than thou" preaching. ;-). And, thank you for the compliment.
It doesn't really much matter to me if an nth party person creates a page of ads or Google themselves do it. Either way I personally see it as a bad user experience and I'd rather not say one or the other is OK because the user will learn the difference eventually.
Keep going Google and rid us of all the pure ad pages (a.k.a. paps).
JAG
If the crack down also gets rid of some of the article pages with "borrowed" and/or "reworked" content, maybe there will be less borrowing of content in the future.
Hey...one can hope. :)
FarmBoy
If the crack down also gets rid of some of the article pages with "borrowed" and/or "reworked" content, maybe there will be less borrowing of content in the future.
I quoted from a 'learn how to make MFA's' website about 20 pages back. Right there, the author said that he grabs content and doesn't care about duplication. (He magnanimously sometimes provides a link to the original author).. My guess is that a lot of the original content publishers will see their sites doing better once the MFAs start to wither and die.
A lot of smaller publishers (including myself) never really had the time or expertise to track down all of the 'borrowed' content. I did notice that a lot of the links pointing to my sites in the Google webmaster tools were pointing to scraped snippets on MFA pages... Nice to think I was helping someone make 70 grand a month!
I think this will have a positive effect for the orignial publishers but (1) the mfa's have to really die and (2) it will take a couple of google updates to start seeing the results.
cg
Second the affect of arbitrageurs leaving the space might be that regular advertisers will lower their minimum bid price. As an arbitrageur you bid as low as you can so you fill the bottom end and regular advertiser pay a premium to rank higher and get more impressions. Now that the bottom end is gone I would think that advertisers are going to bid less and get just as much traffic.
And that is exactly what is happening at my AdWords account since May 17. as I mentioned already some posts earlier. I am now able to advertise in the content network of my niche again at a few cents per click, which I wasn't able to do for about six months. My ads are very specific to the advertised site, and not optimized for getting clicks as the arbitrage ads were, and therefore CTR is considerable lower than MFA ads. The nett effect is that the AdSense sites my ads appear on since May 17. have ads with roughly the same EPC as before, but a much lower CTR, effecting in a lower CPM.
We shouldn't forget--independent what we think about the arbitrage model--that people involved in the arbitrage business were a) specialists in getting great CTR from their AdWords campaigns, and b) specialists in getting great CTR from the AdWords blocks on their landing pages, causing a lot of money to flow around in the content network.
When the arbitrageurs are gone by June 1. the regular publishers will be stuck with their less optimized sites with less optimized ads, causing a lower general CTR network wide, and hence less money from the advertizers flowing into the content network.
advertisers are going to bid less and get just as much traffic
Maybe this should be said this way:
LEGIT advertisers are going to bid less and get just as much traffic
Sounds great to me. I was happy with prices legit advertisers were willing to pay before all the nonsense scam artists decided to rear their ugly heads.
