Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Anyway, what struck me in the MediaPost publication of the story is this quote:
"Jupiter Research analyst Niki Scevak was lukewarm over any looming Yahoo! Adsense-like offering, explaining that the money at stake is negligible at this stage. "We don't know what it's done for Google because they haven't told us, but I don't think it's much," Scevak said. "
... First, interesting that Google hasn't even informed investors of the role AdSense plays in its revenue stream. I don't follow Google financials, but I thought people had a rough understanding?
Secondly, if it hasn't done much revenue-wise, where does that leave all of us in the near future, and long-term?
Any thoughts?
Hunter
Still, I highly doubt its negligible. Just add up the differences in your Google check numbers (and especially the huge gap between January and December to show all the publishers that didn't make the monthly cut but got paid out then).
AdSense in all aspects is important to Google one would think. If not, why would Yahoo! be making a play for the market in the first place?
If it was any other industry, I'd say your logic about "why else would yahoo make a play for it" is dead on, and good enough for me.
But we have many years of internet companies doing stupid, follow-the-leader things that made little fiscal sense. That, and watching The Apprentice every week sends home just how shaky corporate decision making seems to be. (All people with great resumes, who make the most obvious mistakes...)
On the surface it makes a lot of sense, pardon the pun. Aggregate a mass audience and create a mass network of publishers. "Free content" that extends their ad reach by insanely large multiples.
But the catch is that this is pay-per-click. If the clicks don't pay for the advertiser, they opt out of the network, so it doesn't matter how large the network is.
It's old school thinking - "get the largest amount of eyeballs possible" - ramming against 21st century marketing - "only pay for those people who are buying, OR those going to buy".
Who wouldn't want 10 customers vs. 10,000 browsers?
... Of course one of the biggest flaws in my logic is that "everyone will measure" or that "everyone is driving people to buy".
The fact is that even with the biggest companies, measurement is spotty at best. And there appear to be more and more people who are willing to pay just to have people visit their site, and they hope to monetize that now or down the road.
Things to consider, in either event.
Either way I hear you on stupid business decisions. If you have checked Business 2.0's annual list of 101 Dumbest Corporate Moves it's always a hoot.
Maybe, maybe not. They have to scale up to being able to print thousands of cheques, supply tons of data flawlessly to us small time publishers.
However, I do agree with what Paris said - even if this is a loss leader for Yahoo, it does give them the bragging rights to say they have X% of market share, and so on. I think Google claims up to 80% exposure to the internet market.
From that point of view - they are generating some revenue for it, so it IS a good investment, better than a lot of stupid TV ads promoting Overture, or whatever!
publisher.yahoo.com - If I can't link to that here, forgive me, but it does save me answering a lot of sticky mail.
The check part is easy and can be outsourced.
The data / reporting I believe they can handle no problem.
Dealing with all of those LITTLE publishers - now THAT is the question.
I don't believe yahoo will let "anyone" in there program ... my gut says they will have a tougher screen then Adsense
1) Niki Scevak doesn't do her homework and is just spouting misguided opinion, should probably be fired from her job for incompetence.
2) Yahoo wouldn't be chasing the AdSense small-publisher model if they didn't need growth in Overture revenues, so I'm sure it's not chump change.
Just look at Yahoo's homepage and see all the things that they're involved. This, while it seems hard to us, is nothing to Yahoo.
On the surface it makes a lot of sense, pardon the pun. Aggregate a mass audience and create a mass network of publishers. "Free content" that extends their ad reach by insanely large multiples.
You've missed the point of what AdSense is. AdSense isn't a "mass audience" network, except for Google's premium partners.
AdSense's unique selling proposition is that it's a network of niches. It's like a large chain of trade or enthusiast magazines, as opposed to PEOPLE or NEWSWEEK.
But the catch is that this is pay-per-click. If the clicks don't pay for the advertiser, they opt out of the network, so it doesn't matter how large the network is.
Again, it isn't the network's size; it's the ability to advertise to targeted audiences of prospects. The execution isn't perfect (because advertisers aren't able to keep their ads off "premium partner" sites, scraper sites, and other general-interest sites), but the underlying concept has a long history of success in other media, and the Web enhances it with advantages that traditional media can't offer (such as immediate clickthrough to the advertiser's Web site as opposed to typing in a URL, calling a toll-free number, or filling in and mailing a bingo card).
It's old school thinking - "get the largest amount of eyeballs possible" - ramming against 21st century marketing - "only pay for those people who are buying, OR those going to buy".
The "premium partner" aspect of the network may be "old school," but the ability to aggregate impressions and clicks from special-interest sites is new. It works for advertisers, and it works for Google because it expands the market for contextual advertising beyond the kinds of ads that work well on mass-market portals and news/entertainment sites.
Again, Google's execution isn't what it could be, but AdSense is a first-generation product and we're likely to see improvements and extensions in the future--especially if Yahoo leapfrogs Google's existing "content network" with better advertiser controls or higher standards of quality.
2) Yahoo wouldn't be chasing the AdSense small-publisher model if they didn't need growth in Overture revenues, so I'm sure it's not chump change.
Not to mention that one motivation might be that some of today's Adsense publishers are tomorrow's Overture publishers (in other words, start an Adesense-type program to get the small publishers and keep them if they get big).
But we have many years of internet companies doing stupid, follow-the-leader things that made little fiscal sense.
Google played follow the leader copying Overtures keyword bidding system and made AdSense but lowered the bar for entry to get more sites. Did it make little fiscal sense?
Now Yahoo/Overture is coming back and offering smaller sites entry that are below the 10 million page views a month threshold to gain back what they lost to Google. I know a lot of sites like mine getting over 1 million page views a month, so 10 of us are worth 1 site Yahoo currently uses as the minimum.
I think when the smoke clears we'll end up with 3-4 large scale media ad companies and everyone else will be along for the ride with profit sharing.
I know a lot of sites like mine getting over 1 million page views a month
I think this is a severe overestimation of number of sites getting that kind of traffic. Further, when you filter out the forums and other high pageview to unique visitors sites, the number of "cherry" sites is even more limited.
How many publishers do people really think make it to the UPS club? hundreds? thousands? many thousands?
Heck how many publishers get over $1,000/month? thousands? many thousands? tens of thousands?
I think there is a tremendous drop-off in number of publishers as revenue goes up to meaningful amounts. I would guess, the sum total revenue of all Google's small publishers is far less than half of their major sites and far more irritating for them to deal with.
EFV is right. Flawed though it may be, AdSense is the best execution yet of a network that's as big or as small, as global or as local, as an advertiser wants it to be.
It has always seemed to me that the rubber really meets the road when advertisers start to harness the ability to localize advertising to those in their target markets. I have very successfully used AdWords to find very specific types of clients looking for legal representation in particular states and cities. A personal injury lawyer practicing in Timbuktu has no need to reach injured parties in, say, Omaha.
As an advertiser, I'm happy to say the cost of these ads has been minuscule -- a gnat compared to the cost of any other kind of advertising in one of America's top three cities -- though (of course) as a currently-on-sabattical AdSense publisher, I'd like to make myself pay more.
It is a brilliant, information-age product. Yes, it has flaws but it's still the best model to date and its revenue growth can only continue as localization of the Web crawls forward. Analysts simply don't understand it. They have fused the words "Google" and "search" in their minds and reject anything that doesn't fit that description.
BTW, EFV was right to take issue with my calling AdSense a "rep firm." He is correct in noting that it is an "ad network." There's a big difference and I was sloppy in one of my earlier rants.
The sign-up for more information form is at
publisher.yahoo.com - If I can't link to that here, forgive me, but it does save me answering a lot of sticky mail.
I was torn between leaving my Yahoo email address and my Gmail address...
:p
I think this is a severe overestimation of number of sites getting that kind of traffic.
If alexa is to be believed, as iffy as it is, many 10s of thousands probably get up to a million page views a month. However, many of these sites wouldn't be good AdSense candidates being ecommerce sites or other things.
Heck how many publishers get over $1,000/month? thousands? many thousands? tens of thousands?
<show of hands> I DO! </show of hands>
Based on all the people in WebmasterWorld alone claiming $30/day and up I'd suspect a lot make at least $1000/month.
I'd suspect a lot make at least $1000/month.
It all depends on what you mean by a lot. As small publishers (myself included), we often miss sight of the staggering numbers involved. According to the Reuter's data, Google had revenue of 3.19B last year.
So again, what's a lot - are there 1,000 people here at webmasterworld doing serious AdSense making on average $1,000/month? One-thousand times one-thousand is a million bucks. Since nobody knows Google's percent take, let's use an easy 50% and we get webmasterworld members adding about 24 million/year to Google's revenue. Not a whole heck of a lot compared to 3.19 billion.
Sure these numbers are all PFA, and I'm just trying to be optimistic about the webmasterworld folks, but my point is that you have to make some really wild-eyed guesses to make small publisher revenue very meaningful to Google.
That's what matters to Yahoo, taking part in the splintering of search, content distribution and ecommerce.
I think there is a tremendous drop-off in number of publishers as revenue goes up to meaningful amounts. I would guess, the sum total revenue of all Google's small publishers is far less than half of their major sites and far more irritating for them to deal with.
That's probably true, just as it is with affiliate programs. For Google, going the "no publisher too small" route had the advantage of building a dominant market share very quickly, so that future competitors would have to lure publishers away. So it'll be interesting to see how Yahoo approaches recruitment. Will it try to just carve off as big a share of Google's publisher base as it can, or will it set a minimum level of traffic or monthly payout? I'd guess the latter, for two reasons:
1) Yahoo has been more "corporate" and less populist than Google for a long time, with its directory submission fees and pay-for-inclusion search.
2) Since Google has already won the market-share war, there's no compelling reason for Yahoo to recruit publishers with little traffic or low-revenue content.
But that's idle speculation on my part.
Y did ask about monthly pageviews. If the traffic criterion is high enough, few adsense publishers will be able to get to the perceived greener pasture.
But--assuming the bar is set high enough to exclude most--what's the point of going after the contextual market if the group you'll select from is so numerically small?
Also, publishers who can't make the minimum traffic level requirements (assuming this might be the case) but who have the potential to LATER deliver high traffic may choose not to reapply after having been rebuffed. Y could lose out later by being too exclusionary to begin with.
I agree. Although its possible they asked just because they'll want to beta-test with a small group of publishers, those with over X amount of page views, and then open it up from there.
I do have to lean toward EFV's suspicions that they'll go more "corporate" with bigger sites... but at the same time that will cut down the smaller niches they could advertise on.
Going to be an interesting few months, isn't it?
But--assuming the bar is set high enough to exclude most--what's the point of going after the contextual market if the group you'll select from is so numerically small?
They wouldn't have to set the bar terribly high. 100,000 PVs per month might be high enough to exclude the personal and beginner sites, but it would be low enough to attract a wide spectrum of special-interest sites that are established even if they aren't very big.
Or they could have different minimums for different types of sites, to acount for the fact that some sites (such as forums) get a lot of PVs but usually don't perform very well for advertisers.
Or they could carry monthly earnings forward until a site had a minimum of $500, which would discourage owners of the smallest sites from applying.
Or they use a flexible scoring system, assigning points for such things as traffic, editorial quality, category, type of content, anticipated profitability, etc.
There are a lot of ways to be selective without being rigid or unrealistic.
Also, publishers who can't make the minimum traffic level requirements (assuming this might be the case) but who have the potential to LATER deliver high traffic may choose not to reapply after having been rebuffed. Y could lose out later by being too exclusionary to begin with.
Maybe, but I doubt it. The perception of exclusivity can be a powerful marketing tool, as any co-op board or country-club membership committee knows. Yahoo could do worse than to make joining its publisher network something to aspire to.
EFV has been talking about this for some time, and I tend to agree - there's a large area in between big corporate sites and mom and pop "$10/month will cover my hosting costs" ones.
100,000 PVs per month
Some top niche sites have less than this while some real junk sites have more.
it all depends on how niche a site is. For example a general widgeting site may get many more than 100,000 page views but a specific aspect of widgeting will get less.
Definitely going to be interesting. Might be best to just hang back and watch for awhile.
