Ya see again... im just sticking to the facts. 1- Google saying they respect adsense as a business model 2- Google President Kim Malone saying they will use Adwords data to show which Adsense publishers convert bad and who they will smart price or ban. I am not guessing what google is doing or coming up with theories on click fraud. I was just laying out what we do know as fact.
Darn straight, adpubster. Good description of arbitrage at this page, which I have no association with: http://gotads.blogspot.com/2006/07/what-is-click-arbitrage.html Now, I assume it's OK to have a landing page with unique content that you advertise via adwords and have adsense ads on...partly because I haven't gotten a notice. Then again, I only spend $300/month on AdWords. I've thought about arbitrage without knowing what it is, but never researched it enough to make the investment.
No mention of this at any of the black hat forums, and no contributors here admitting to the dreaded email. Is this just a rumor that's gone out of control? (although I do notice that 14 people have clicked "this is bad for me" in the poll)
Kind of why I made the comment that I did above. I have heard a few people admit to to receiving the letter on webmasterworld but that's the extent of it. Monday may bring a flood of them, though. Could also be that if it's true they are frantically trying to cover their tracks with a changed business model and are too busy to come in and post anything.
Or they are shellshocked, or consulting with each other, or drowning their sorrows, etc. But we have to wait until June 1 to find out how big a shakeout there has been, or even if this is a major shakeout at all.
something like this: step 1. create a small site on a high paying topic (e.g., loans). step 2. put adsense on there. the ads will pay lots. step 3. buy cheap traffic with adwords, no more than 3 cents a click. result: pay 3 cents per visitor, earn up to several $ per visitor. This is also called "flipping traffic." These sites are not interested in getting actual visitors or building real sites. They buy cheap traffic through cheap ads, then send the visitors to a page full of high-paying ads, hoping the visitors will click. note: I don't do this myself. just know how it works.
I've said it before (or at least something very similar) that 1.5 day's worth of statistics are pretty much meaningless so take the following with a grain of salt and keep watching your stats for trends, but today was VERY good. I had killed my filter 10 days ago for some more research and then the news broke about the 1 June stuff. Comparing to my 10-day no-filter averages, I'm about 7 standard deviations up today. Unprecedented for an empty filter.
I can't see why current arbi players would bother killing their campaigns until midnight May 31st. Milk all the profit you can. Google is paying out May in accordance with their standard terms, so let the profits ride. My belief is it's probably the small players that are pulling their campaigns in the hope they'll fly under G's radar while this purge is under way. I know that's what I would have done.
great news. It was about time to get rid of those useless websites creating no value to the web user.
This might make arbitrage more difficult, but won't kill it. Those playing the game can direct visitors to a page of Yahoo ads, or a page of affiliate ads. This is because their adwords account is still live.
Holy Jesus! I can't believe this. I am not used to Google doing non-evil things. I am going to have to take down my Larry Page dart board and put away my Sergey Brin voodoo doll.