AdSense Premium Partnerships -- good idea? against TOS?

I've been talking with some local friends I've met through the AdSense publisher network -- basically other people like us who monetize their sites through AdSense.

I've gone away from the "blend blend blend" routine that attempts to trick my visitors to more of a "sell a product and hope that people convert" attempts. I think this helps bring people back to the site. We are even rewriting our code to allow regulars to disable ads if they aren't interested in that aspect. Whatever I can do to get people to visit (whether or not they click).

For a while, I thought that the Premium Publisher options really weren't worth much. Too often we see PP's seem to use super-blending to just trick visitors into visiting advertisers rather than encouraging people to visit advertisors for more information or to buy a product. I think that it is counter-productive for the AdSense/AdWords balance to use trickery. It also seems to help combat smart pricing if you're really offering advice to buy a product or service. I have a firm belief that AdSense has a team that monitors websites that generate traffic and can manually rate a site as worthy of getting better ads/payouts and those that are simply MfA.

Yet now I see Premium Publishers who use their status for good -- to actually create advertising that IS entirely advertiser, publisher and visitor friendly!

So here's what we've been talking about. None of us come anywhere NEAR the numbers needed to get Premium Publisher status. Yet all of us can see the role that PP plays in growing your income which lets you grow your site for more visitors.

Has anyone thought of dumping their individual AdSense accounts and uniting (say, under a corporation) a bunch of individual publishers into a larger one under one domain name. Just like about.com is not about anything but a variety of topics (and a premium publisher), these new networks could be based on the idea of sharing revenue while driving up the overall traffic to gain PP status. I'm not sure what the TOS really offers regarding a site having to offer just on topic (most Premium Publisher domains seem to be all over the place topic wise). Have others joined together to form a network and has it been successful?

Premium Publisher status doesn't seem to have been reached by many (if any?) individual publishers. It is mostly there for large businesses which is no different than a bunch of individuals uniting to form a network within on subdomain.

Thoughts? Has the idea been debated before?

 

I have no idea if it's allowed or not, but I wouldnt do it because you run a higher risk of getting your account banned. If one person in your team of people bodges up he could then be the cause of getting the whole account suspended which would annoy all other partners.

 

I have no idea if it's allowed or not, but I wouldnt do it because you run a higher risk of getting your account banned. If one person in your team of people bodges up he could then be the cause of getting the whole account suspended which would annoy all other partners.

I'm not worried about being banned -- I would never allow anyone into the network who didn't have a history of being solid in terms of TOS and responsibility in not being a MfA site owner.

I know a few people who have hit 2+ million hits a month, but that is only 10% of what you need to reach PP status (supposedly). If 10-15 of these guys got together, I think they'd be able to reach MORE people and increase the quality of visitors for the advertisers, too.

 

It would be tempting but I think good agreements would need to be put in place and signed. As long as you keep good tabs on who will be entering then it could work for you.

 

I am not sure if you should take the risk.

 

This is really great idea however it will be very hard for you to find people who you can trust from internet and specially if you dont know them in real life however i dont think that PPs can get banned as easy as regular publishers....

 

Premium publishers are hand picked by Google, I don't think you can even apply for it.

And even so, Google would screen your application under a microscope and would sure find out of anything like this, it is not so easy.

 

OH yes forgot about that ... How do you apply for PP