Ethics Question

While I dont have enough traffic to warrent doing this yet, I was wondering what people thought about the ethics of doing what I am thinking of.

While I dont think it is against the ToS, what do people think about the idea of tracking who clicks on adds, and for the people who frequently click on ads sending them an email saying something like "Thank you for supporting our website. In appreciation, we would like to ....."?

This would be a private email, not something shown on the site, so it is not a tool to try to get people to click more, it is really just a way of saying thank you.

What do you think?

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No... that would be a violation of the ToS because you will either attract undue attention to the ads or incentivise clicking on ads (In appreciation, we would like to .....).

So ethnically that would be wrong and could get your account banned if Google gets to know about this. So my advice would be not to do it.

 

Thats almost like asking for people to click on the ads in the future.

 

Agreed. It is like providing incentive for clicking and that is not allowed. If you are in this business for the long run, don't worry about finding shortcuts. Just focus on making your site better and the returns will come naturally (in theory...=)

 

Suppose there is someone who always clicks an ad whenever the visit a site. This is not happening on my site (in fact I would be happy with a visitor that even clicks on a link ever )The first question is, is this ethical of the user to do? My opinion is that it is ethical - since it is a win for everyone - the user feels good supporting a site, the site owner is happy because they have revenue, and the advertiser is happy because they are getting traffic. Even if the purpose of the click is just to help out the hosting site, if the advertising site is a good site, there is a reasonable chance the user will revisit.

So, assuming that such a user exists (and I dont know if there are any), as the site owner, is there a way to say "thanks" without being unethical.

This is just a theoretical question, since I dont know if I will ever have users like this, but if it does happen, is there a way to show appreciation without it seeming like incentive to click?

 

You are assuming too much about the advertiser in this case. I don't think the advertiser would be happy with these kind of clicks because they are ultimately interested in conversions not clicks.