Does Google Penalize Success?

Is your site too good?

[doc38320]

Does Google actually do this? How does a site avoid this? Just curious to your thoughts. thanks

[Zygoot]

The more you earn the more Google earns. So why would they penalize you for being successful?

However, there is something called smart pricing which favors the advertisers by giving them cheaper clicks based on your conversion rate (and possibly other stuff.)

[OptiRex]

The more you earn the more Google earns. So why would they penalize you for being successful?

So that they earn even more off one's hard work!

[moneyraker]

One scenario would be if Google presumes that there comes a point at which the publisher's traffic increases exponentially, i.e., he gets much more traffic with much less effort to bring them in than he used to. If such were their assumption, then they may think that the publishers wouldn't mind if they'd take a slightly higher share than usual as a publisher's traffic grows. So the question is, do they really take a higher % of the earnings as the publishers' traffic increases?

I certainly hope not, because I have yet to see my traffic increase exponentially with respect to the effort I put into this. Oftentimes I even see the reverse: more effort, less traffic!

[Ankhenaton]

That's always the case. Those that control the monetary needy masses make the most. Happened in Klondyke, the Net , Banks etc.

[TheDonster]

It would seem to me to be the logic behind smart pricing. If your site starts to send a lot of traffic to the highest paying advertiser on your site, perhaps smart pricing kicks in after a certain amount of traffic is sent. The highest advertiser on any one site will always be prominently displayed and logically get the most traffic. All the traffic that you send this one site cannot possibly convert in the short term, so Google discounts the amount of ad traffic sent after a certain amount. Many brick and mortar stores will give substantial discounts to their best customers, why not Google? It would seem the only way to avoid this is to be a premium publisher since they can negotiate the share of ad revenue with Google beforehand.

[europeforvisitors]

There are any number of possible reasons why a publisher might experience what appears to be a "penalty for success." For example:

1) There may be only so many high-paying ads in the publisher's niche, and at some point the publisher may be getting fewer of those ads because a daily quota has been exceeded. (It wouldn't be unreasonable for Google to spread ads around instead of letting a handful of publishers drain an advertiser's budget.)

2) If the publisher has optimized his pages for clickthroughs, clicks may be growing faster than conversions. A falling conversion rate may be accompanied by a deeper "smart pricing" discount for advertisers, resulting in lower EPC and ePCM.