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?
banning ina friendly manner
If Google thinks some of the clicks generated via MFA converted for their advertisers, but they do not want MFA any more, it is logical that they closed them down this way.
So do you people realize what this mean? It means that Google has only taken action against MFA sites now. ONLY NOW!
p.s. FOREST is a navigational menu that consists of 150-200 links to word related by topic pages on left or right side of page with in a site and a couple of other UNIQUE QUALITY WIDGET sites.
:)
I say honest webmasters deserve a second chance.
Maybe Google thinks on average that the type of people doing MFA sites and arbitrage are the type of people always trying to game the system, so it's a judgment of character as undesirable business partners. It was written black on white in the TOS that pages shouldn't be made just for displaying ads (or barely, which in spirit is the same thing).
MFA aren't harmless. For one, think of the untold hours that real publishers have wasted trying to hunt down MFA to put in their competitive filters instead of creating real new content that could have increased their bottom line. They have been hurt by this.
Second, MFA sites seriously discredit the Google ad system and many will not click on those ads anymore. Another financial loss for real content providers.
It's like spam. One spammer may not be that bad (although personally, I disagree) but the spamming phenomenon has seriously hurt businesses and the email system in general. So if it was possible, I would ban all spammers from using email forever.
If I am not buying any traffic from Adwords, then am I safe from this banning thingy?
FYI I have 0 clicks last month, and about 3 clicks this month. Will Goog overlook my account because of the low volume?
This all sounds so scary.
[edited by: PowerUp at 7:00 pm (utc) on May 19, 2007]
Yes, you are safe from being banned for running 'arbitrage' sites.... and no, you are not safe if you are running sites that break Googles TOS for AdSense.
I seriously doubt Google would be doing this if they didn't see profits going up long term. Restoring trust in Adsense ads can only be a good thing.
Sailor, I don't see that at all.
I think the end result will be flat to slightly lower. Let's boil it down. MFAs are able to work arbitrage because -- for the most part (hate to generalize) -- they have thin content and highly (overly) optimized ad placements. So they can spend $0.03 a click on ads that are clicked on four times as much as the $0.10 ad (because they are better written, more effective, etc.) with a 40% CTR on the landing page.
Why is it that an arb's $0.03 ad got featured above the dime ad? By wiping out the arbs, clickthrough rates will fall, $ per click will rise, yet overall CPM should be slightly lower (or else the arbs would have never been doing this to begin with).
We can applaud that the Internet will get less noisy and softer on the eyes as a consumer, but I can't see it getting any more lucrative to us as publishers? The numbers don't bear that out.
It's naive to think that advertisers are going to jump in with more high-paying ads as a show of confidence. For a sponsor, a lead is a lead. Whether they come from your content site or an MFA's wall of noise, the clicker steps into a new site the same way. If anything the MFA may help the advertiser with a "phew, what a relief -- a REAL website" moment to disarm.
I would be shocked if I'm wrong and this becomes a more lucrative event to us as publishers, though I'd certainly welcome it as I too have seen AdSense CPM drop every single year since 2003.
