From an advertisers standpoint I'm not too enthused with this at all - as I stated in the above thread.
What's the problem?
Well, the problem isn't contextual advertising as such. The problem is that I can't pick and choose where my ads will appear.
I want a button for each site, category of site or some way to choose where my ads will appear. Go and be innovative - find a way for my ads for (for example) loans to appear on About.com and 'Joe's financial help site' but not on 'big berthas cooking blog' and 'mr. financial search results scraper site'. Until I have some kind of functionality to achieve this, the content network will remain resolutely 'off'.
This request isn't new - it's been echoed a good few times before. I can tell what traffic converts myself - and I want to focus on that traffic - but how can I if it is lumped in with 200,000 sites which don't produce.
Google can't keep all the publishers happy - nor can they keep all their advertisers happy. But who is more important?
Sure, if they introduce a feature for advertisers to pick and choose between adsense channels/sites, there will be some Adsense sites which nobody will want to advertise on. These sites will stop participating.
But, guess what Google, that's why the content network doesn't work - there are some sites where nobody wants to advertise and getting rid of these will increase the overall quality of the content network. It will also increase the number of advertisers using the network = more cash!
I'm sure some people have had great success with the content network - keep it up - but until I get more than a checkbox - I'm staying away.
Some people have been throwing around the idea of a two-tier system of adsense publishers. I don't think this is the best way to go, but it would be an improvement.
Scraper sites are disliked by not only advertisers but also by other publishers because they are esentially using snipets of our content to make money without any value added.
Is there a way to create a tool that shows the top 10,20 or 50 content sites where the ad-group is shown and then lets the advertiser opt out?
We use OnePoint to track campaigns but for that matter any good log analyser would do the same, which is to show you which keyword triggered the sale where the referrer was googleadsyndication.com (or whatever it is called). Running a Google search for that term followed by "ads by google" should show a bunch of sites including most publishers that rank high for the term.
