Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The automated solution to this problem imo would be to have following feature made available for adsense publishers:
"Don't show ads paying less than $x.xx per click".
With that option/control a publisher could simply raise the level of earnings per click above those of MfA ads, but keep it below those of legit ads so MfA ads wouldn't show anymore and MfA sites would soon vanish. The process of determing the level of earnings per click would be a market finding one for the publisher and the level would depend on the topic of his website.
This will work and won't hurt the adword advertiser by raising the levels of cost per click for him, because if a publisher would raise his level too high (above the market price) no ads would show on his website. So he would be forced to lower it again, until enough real bidded ads appear. aso.
I am puzzled why Google hasn't implemented this feature yet, since they love automation. Atm, they have to manually clear out MfA sites, so why not let the publisher do the work?
What do you think? I, as an publisher would love to have this tool.
Our solution to this issue and what many other advertisers are starting to do is Pay Per Action. Most larger advertisers have already killed off their content network PPC ads.
For my topic, large advertisers have never been that important. (They'd much rather buy display skyscrapers or leaderboards.) In any case, my August average eCPM was higher than the January-to-July average, so if any larger advertisers did pull up their tents and move elsewhere, better-paying smaller advertisers have taken their place.
(fWIW, I've never had eBay ads for "dead popes," but I have had fill-in-the-keyword template ads for some of the giant online travel agencies on rare occasions, and I've always thought of them as being "filler ads" that appeared when better-paying ads from smaller, more targeted advertisers weren't available.)
EFV, do not think that advertisers soon will not figure out that they can make image ads via PPA as well real soon. We already have image and banner campaigns running with PPA.
EFV, do not think that advertisers soon will not figure out that they can make image ads via PPA as well. We already have image and banner campaigns running with PPA.
EFV, do not think that advertisers soon will not figure out that they can make image ads via PPA as well. We already have image and banner campaigns running with PPA.
Not on my site, you don't. :-)
Our solution to this issue and what many other advertisers are starting to do is Pay Per Action. Most larger advertisers have already killed off their content network PPC ads.
Interesting. But do you really think PPA will replace PPC on a greater scale? I mean, will publisher replace their PPC slots with PPA slots? I always thought Adsense got popular with publishers because it was PPC and not PPA..
(a) An automated, set-and-forget solution like CPC;
(b) More profitable than CPC for the publisher, since publishers who have other options won't accept greater risk without greater rewards.
I think CPA is likely to remain a product extension (like site-targeted CPM ads), not a replacement for the core AdSense product (which is generating close to a billion dollars in revenue, or possibly more, every quarter).
Most larger advertisers have already killed off their content network PPC ads.
I'm seeing exactly the opposite in many areas, with increased bids and bigger adsense exposure to the niches.
In fact, the larger advertisers are getting very good at formulating their ads and analyzing their adsense referrals and squeezing the most ROI out of the content network affiliates.
Combine that with better adsense targeting from Google to the content of the page and you have one wonderful package.
only a system with equal marketing risk distribution attracts both advertisers and publishers in masses and earns billions for google. look at google's success story. look at their core product. so.. dream on or forget it.
by the way, ecce, you are wrong. you can't optimize your (and google's) earnings by shooting down some of the best performing ads. inconsistence stands..
what you can do is reduce the amount of high ctr / low epc ads and cause collateral damage. if you have facts that this damage will benefit google long-term, go for it.
publishers will not accept being pulled over the barrel with sneaky ppa branding for free, lousy income like a lottery, risk distribution completely against them, massive tracking issues, huge ppa fraud incentives and complete dependency on the advertisers' abilities to perform.
There are ways for Google to minimize "free branding" (just as there are with CPC ads) and to prevent CPA vendor fraud. But not all advertisers are willing to give Google full access to proprietary data (such as conversion data) that would be required to make CPA acceptable to Google and publishers. (What percentage of advertisers use Google's conversion tracking, for example? Probably a minority, to judge from the discussions that I've seen on the AdWords forum.)
I know some publishers are scared of it as well, but we sell and publish ourselves and I can say on both sides of the fence its working out much better than PPC ever will. Our Selling sites are making more conversions and our publishing sites are making more money.
PPA is more profitable for the publishers and is great for the advertisers as well. It is a set and forget advertisement. You never have to monitor the cost of it unlike PPC. I do not know where you are getting those thoughts from.
I agree that PPA is great for the advertisers. No, even better: it's fantastic! They limit their risk to ZERO.
But "PPA is more profitable for the publishers"? I do not know where you are getting those thoughts from?
PPA is just another method to determine the price a publisher gets for displaying ads. It depends largely on the individual situation whether or not PPA is profitable. IMO you can not generalize here.
Yes, PPA might be better if you are working in a profitable niche, with a reliable partner that tells you exactly what is going on and why, and with advertisers who take that business serious and who can be trusted.
From reading the first reports on Google's PPA here, I get the impression that a good number of "advertisers" (read: MFAs, thin-content-sites) clearly try to exploit the system, again. And it is attractive for them to seek loopholes as their benefit is FREE TRAFFIC. They reduce their cost to ZERO, which is the ultimate goal for any MFA/arbitrageur.
PPA is built upon a trusted three-way partnership (platform, advertiser, and publisher). Thus, before deploying PPA ads, publishers need to be 100% sure that ALL transactions are reported back to the platform. After all, it is in the hands of the advertiser to guide the user to complete a transaction. Publishers need to trust that advertiser to follow the rules. If he builds weak landing pages or does not report every conversion (e.g. through shady tactics), then publishers are giving away users for FREE. How can that be good for me as a publisher?
With my experience on Google's current "advertisers" (on PPC) I can not be sure about the advertiser quality at all. There are still (too) many parked pages, MFAs, low-quality sites, thin-content sites, mail harvesters, scammers. IF Google had proven that they are able to eliminate any shady advertisers, then I would consider PPA with them.
Unfortunately, this thread is drifting away from it's original topic, which was the MFA/Arbitrage problem and ecce's proposal.
Unfortunately, this thread is drifting away from it's original topic, which was the MFA/Arbitrage problem and ecce's proposal.
Maybe because it's been discussed to death by now? :-)
Less so in the case of adwords/other because they are actually not taking money out of the "google" system but actually putting some in. But... Still bad as it will in the end stop visitors clicking the ads at all because they dont want to be confronted by a page of ads all ofering the same again. And again... So it hurts legitimate content publishers and the entire system eventually.
But we all know that already...
[edited by: Genuine1 at 6:55 pm (utc) on Sep. 2, 2007]
MFA/Arbitrage, I am not sure why publishers are complaining about it anyways. Is it your fear that these people with little to no content will outperform you?
Ditto what Genuine1 said. Also, the "user experience" is something that needs to be considered. If users come to believe that AdSense ads are junk ads, the presence of those ads reflects poorly on the hosting site.
Let's not forget that the "user experience" is the reason Google gave for creating landing-page quality scores for AdWords: It didn't want AdWords clickers to get frustrated by crappy landing pages and think negatively about the referring site, Google.com.
Less so in the case of adwords/other because they are actually not taking money out of the "google" system but actually putting some in.
THIS is a major mis-conception that currently also seems to be present at The Plex.
The reality is that arbitrageurs might put money into the "Google" system, BUT they take money out of the "online advertising" system. You see, these guys can ONLY be profitable if they buy clicks cheaper than they re-sell it. The gap between buying and selling is their profit margin. Thus, they find high-paying advertisers on the ADVERTISING market that are willing to shell out high amounts per click. Google competes on this market and apparently fails to convince advertisers to part with their money. The arb folks, however, usually work with Overture who CAN sell their product.
So, yes, these customers/clicks could have been sold directly, from Google to the advertiser, leaving out YPN, the parked host, and the MFA operator/domainer. Google has all the systems in place to sell directly. Yet, the advertisers turn to (e.g.) YPN to buy the clicks. YPN is not afraid to put such ads on parked pages run by arbitrageurs, so, apparently, Yahoo! does care even less than Google. In lack of genuine traffic, the arbitrageur buys cheap traffic from Google content network (i.e. from us!). So what the advertising customer with YPN gets is cheap traffic from Google (where he paid for high-quality traffic from Yahoo!). Only he does not know that, or does not care.
But again, the arbitrageur is NOT adding money to the system, he is withdrawing money from the system (online advertising), and he helps to inflate (keep inflated) the total online advertising revenue. (How many times are the same revenues accounted for? I'd say at least twice in volume.)
I think it's a major misconception on WBW. Everyone thinks arbs/mfa's end up draining the system. If that was the case why does google continue to post profits every quarter? Why is it that most adsense income for publishers continue to raise over the course of a year?
Do you think google would allow it to happen if they were losing money or if publishers were losing money? No they would not.
Arbs are bidders on keywords, when publishers block them out on their site, they end up losing a bidder.
erm, did you actually read my post?
I think I explained in clear words why arbs are NOT adding to the online advertising market. They only take out of the market. *This* is, and has to be, their ultimate goal, because they have nothing to sell. Nothing but ads. If they *added* something to the online advertising market, they'd be making a loss. And soon out of business.
So please, explain to me again, how arbs actually ADD money to the system themselves?
I agree, though, that we now have a situation where arbs might artificially inflate the ad prices. When they are bidding on keywords they are competing with genuine advertisers in the same system (e.g. Google), who now have to bid higher in order to outbid the arb. Now, if advertisers only realized that it is useless to feed the arbs, they would go straight to Google cutting out the middle men. In such a scenario a bigger number of genuine advertisers would be competing against each other on each system, trying to beat each other, instead of trying to beat the arb player. This increased activity might compensate for the loss of arb advertisers, and the market might benefit in the long run from this.
Yes, I would rather like to put useful and unique genuine ads in front of my visitors.
[edited by: zett at 4:39 pm (utc) on Sep. 3, 2007]
I do not think a publisher setting a minimum would really effect much. Google already does that at $0.20 a click and when google did that, did we see arbs/mfa's go away? No, all it will do is cause inflation of the content network as a whole so it is a bad idea.
As much as I hate them, as long as there is online advertising there will be arbs/MFA's around. It is not different on the outside world for print or radio ads. They all have middlemen as well.
It is not different on the outside world for print or radio ads. They all have middlemen as well.
I don't recall ever seeing a print ad or hearing a radio commercial that sent me to another ad.
I don't recall ever seeing a print ad or hearing a radio commercial that sent me to another ad.
Not yet, but don't be surprised if you do. Lately there's been an ad on local TV stations for a local interest website (i.e., what to do in Los Angeles). When I checked out the website, it had (IMO) very thin content and a bunch of Quigo ads.
So it seems that the MFA model has made its way into other venues.
So it seems that the MFA model has made its way into other venues.
All the more reason for nipping it in the bud.
I do not think google will ever nip it nor would they want to because it inflates pricing. Google's big concern was click fraud for years. The PPA model keeps the advertisers happy and the click fraud worries go away for the most part.
The PPA model keeps the advertisers happy and the click fraud worries go away for the most part.
The PPA model keeps the advertisers happy and the click fraud worries go away for the most part.
It's a bit hard to imagine Google throwing out its main business model, one that's earning billions of dollars in revenue every year, to compete with Commission Junction.
For Google, CPA is merely a product extension, meaning a source of incremental revenue.
Google is not throwing out its main money maker, it is experimenting with a new service. Honestly, ask yourself, if you were spending $100k a month in advertisements on google, which method would you choose? PPA or PPC?
Honestly, ask yourself, if you were spending $100k a month in advertisements on google, which method would you choose? PPA or PPC?
Why use imaginary or hypothetical scenarios? Real advertisers are already spending billions of dollars on Google CPC ads.
It's also worth noting that the most common pricing method in the advertising industry isn't CPC or CPA: It's CPM.
