What effect if any would this have on your AdWords campaigns?
As an advertiser, how would this influence your participation in the content network?
As an advertiser looking at 2 similar sites, one setting a minimum price and the other no setting a minimum, would you be more likely to go with the no minimum site?
And yes, I would generally go for the no min. bid site first.
We make each other money, so some way of allowing publishers and advertisers to "communicate" may benefit both sides, I just have to think more about how it would work. dauction's idea for a tool that allows publishers to invite advertisers to bid for placement on publisher's site would be an interesting first step that I might be open to. Perhaps in form of dashboard alerts, or an extra tab in AdWords dedicated solely to that...
And how will smart pricing play out? on the adsense side.. Too complicated..
I suspect that a lot of publishers don't have a realistic view of what their traffic is worth. I often lurk in the Ad Sense forum, and overhear a lot of blame about how they should not be held responsible for an advertiser not being able to convert their visitors to sales. However, in my experience Content Network traffic has one of the worst conversion rates around. A lot of advertisers work with sites with high conversion rates, and content traffic is heavily discounted because it just contains fewer real prospects.
If they end up making more money this way, good for them. They don't need AdSense.
If they end up making much less, then they'll know their traffic doesn't convert. And isn't worth more.
If they can't find plenty of good product to promote, that means their niche is not profitable. Read as, their traffic won't convert anyway.
So if you can't convert your own traffic, why do you think someone else should pay you extra for the "privilege" of trying and losing money?
It's probably hard to accept, and I'm sure every publisher thinks his/her traffic is great. But that's just not true.
Quality score/smart pricing aside, Google has the closest thing to a perfect free market. And if you are not making enough in a free market, that means something is wrong with you, not the market.
If you don't get targeted ads, that's because there are no products for your audience or those products don't sell well. (Products don't sell well, means the niche is not buying or traffic is worthless.) Otherwise, advertisers would be outbidding themselves in order to get some of your traffic.
Let me rephrase that: if your traffic is in a niche that doesn't spend money, you won't get targeted ads. Because nobody but run-of-the-network-type advertisers would target your keywords/theme.
And run-of-the-network ads will never pay well. After all, it's untargeted traffic. Well, those that do pay well, usually look like scams. Probably because they are to some extent.
In any case, ask yourself this:
How much would you pay for a click from your site and still make money off the visitor?
Don't know?
Haven't tried selling them something?
Tried selling them something but failed?
That's because your traffic is worthless.
The fact that your traffic is worthless doesn't make you a bad person. So don't take it personally. It just means there aren't products that your traffic would buy.
The same people, regrouped into different demographics or different sites, could very well be great shoppers. They just aren't when they are on your site.
I have a niche that tends to get a bit expensive. After seeing numerous clicks, I learned that the website was only getting compensated 5 cents a click. The site is not smart-priced, but for this nich, that's simply too low. In this case, absent a minimum bid that I could set, that an advertiser could see and decide for him or herself, I did what any other publisher would have done. I added to advertiser to a competitive filter to stop the ads from being displayed.
The Free market analogy doesn't apply in this case, as Google manipulates the price so much, it's impossible to tell. Allowing the publisher to specify a minimum bid doesn't harm the process in any way. With all of the analytics available these days, it's fairly easy to determine what traffic is worth anyway. As an advertiser, I want to make sure that I'm where I need to be. As a publisher, I don't want to give my traffic away for nothing - especially if I have other options to monetize it.
On one hand the advertiser could be getting punished for a low quality score while on the other hand the publisher could be getting punished via smart pricing.
Similarly, when an advertiser has a high quality score and paying lower bids, the publisher could be giving away high converting traffic for a fraction of its worth.
In the end it doesn't matter if a minimum bid was set, the QS algorithm or smart pricing algorithm would over-ride it and neither publisher or advertiser would be any better off or any clearer.
The best case scenario (if the ability to set min price was in place), would be for google to determine that if an ad was not going to pay the minimum rate then it wouldn't be shown... but ads from another network would be shown in their place - it would only work for CPM adverts as it would be comparing like-for-like adverts and not relying on the ambiguity of Google.
