First of all could I just say hello to everyone. I am a newbie to Digital Point. As a webmaster of almost 10 years, I wanted to express my gut feelings about Google AdSense and why I think it's dangerous for people to see it as a serious way of making "good" money and, ultimately, a sound business. As far as I can tell, AdSense is still in development and Google openly admit there are still problems with the program that need to be ironed out. However, that is not the REAL concern I have. The concern I have is that I see discussions on this board talking about how to make more money with AdSense. In my opinion, if you have to ask this question you probably have a poor website in which you put ads first and content second. The basic rule of thumb with AdSense is that you choose a colour scheme to match your website. In fact, Google have made it so easy to integrate their ads into the look and feel of your website I'm surprised anyone has to ask these types of questions at all! There is another concern I have: "Clickthrough" programs have been done before - mostly in the adult industry. At first they worked fine, but then as more and more people decided to abuse the system more and more companies withdrew the programs and offered commision only schemes. You have to keep in mind where AdSense money comes from. It comes from advertisers of all shapes and sizes. They depend on QUALITY TRAFFIC! They don't want to see people walking through their doors not knowing why they're there. If they get lots of them they're going to give up paying them to come in! That's why enticing people to click on Google ads at every opportunity is not a good thing. If I go to see a friend who just happens to have a cat, I don't want her cat to meeiow at me for food while my friend sits watching TV. I want to chat to my friend and give her cat some attention when I feel like it. That's why Google AdSense should be used as a part of the furniture of your website. See it as an enhancement to your site rather than just a quick buck.
Hello, welcome If you don't know, if you're not sure, better to ask. Why such a concern about that ? I guess this is why Google is trying Pay Per Action and MSN is thinking about Pay Per Percentage. Nothing new here. I don't entice anyone to click on ads, do you ? Why not both ?
I am on your side! We must make money from our site as well as provide QUALITY TRAFFIC to the advertiser!
Thanks for the reply Monty. I think you've missed my initial point - It has been done before! Many times in many guises. The difference is that Google and the others are playing with OTHER PEOPLE'S money, not their own!
I think 99% of the people on this forum know the Adsense TOS, and follow them very closely. As far as people exchanging advice on how to best optimize their ad feeds, there is nothing illegal, unethical or immoral about that. I run adwords sometimes. I want people to notice my ads and click them. That's why I signed up. Lighten up, Frances.
You said: To entice people to click on ads is "breaking the rules". (Well if my understanding of the verb "to entice" is right, sorry english is not my mother tongue) Cheers up, don't give up
Google are (or were) unique in that they take money from one person and give a portion of that to another and they keep the difference. That's how AdSense works. Clickthrough programs are normally money payed out from a company in return for visitors without Google in between. The danger is that Google are so big the market will become saturated. I said the same thing about the adult industry and I am saying the same thing about AdSense. I hope I'm wrong because I am on my way to making some quality beer money with AdSense.
Monty I was refering to colonel99 not you. Sorry. He said: "I think 99% of the people on this forum know the Adsense TOS, and follow them very closely. As far as people exchanging advice on how to best optimize their ad feeds, there is nothing illegal, unethical or immoral about that."
"The danger is that Google are so big the market will become saturated" The problem is real estate vs billboards. If you have more billboards than real estate you're going to have to rotate signs to give every advertiser enough time to advertise effectively. Eventually you're going to have very small time slices and your real estate is worthless per advertiser. At that point you can cut back on ads, raise prices to deter advertisers or buy more real estate to put ads on. Google found an easy way to get more real estate. "The concern I have is that I see discussions on this board talking about how to make more money with AdSense. In my opinion, if you have to ask this question you probably have a poor website in which you put ads first and content second" I take it you've never made a web-site. People are asking how to improve adsense revenue because they're sites are bringing in lots of visitors but revenue isn't being generated to its full potential. That was my problem earlier this year. More traffic doesn't improve the click thru rate. Revenue scales by the CTR * traffic so what people are asking is how to improve the CTR. Your whole post seems very incoherant and panic stricken. Lighten up. The adult industry failed in CPC because it wasn't centralized. People were frauding disconnected companies which made it impossible to combat since records weren't being shared. If you think AdSense is a bad idea then don't use it. There are plenty of shitty Cost Per Action programs out there you might like. Don't crap on our parade. 99% of Google's revenue comes from AdSense. If they go CPA they'll be dropped like a rock by site owners if they can't keep the current revenue level up. It's in Google's best interest to use their 500lb status to deal with problems so that they can keep site owners happy. Otherwise they will quickly loose a ton of cheap real estate.
Some people is accusing MFA (Made For Adsense, meaning a website is specially made for displaying adsense and is usually lack of useful content). However I am on MFA side. I hate the act of misleading and force clicking instead. Read the full articel in my blog: http:// bepatientberich.blogspot.com/2006/08/speak-for-mfa.html (i coun't post a live link yet, anybody can help?)
Why adult PPC failed: Adult web-site owners tend to be shady and out to screw people in order to make a buck. When you have a bunch of money hungry people running a PPC business of course they're going to be trying to screw each other over. Everyone wants everyone else out of business so they can be the top PPC company. I highly doubt the content is the only reason Google bans adsense on adult sites. It's certainly not the only reason PayPal doesn't do business with adult sites. Adult web-site owners tend to be far less than technologically savy. And they tend to be cheap when hiring people to do stuff for them. Good luck getting cheap uneducated labor to put together a fraud proof PPC program. Google actually pays its people and they're Ph D's.
I agree with you on this. However, most ads aren't "distracting" or drawing people away from the subject, it is more of a resource with the same information, and in return for provided the resource, you get money.
One way to do this would be to stop tricking the user in clicking the ads. Put the adsense in a way where people can clearly distinguish it as ads. This way it will be their choice whether to click them.
Aslong as there are not to many ads and the site is not like "just click ad already" type it should be fine..
If the user clearly reads and understands the ad text then decides to click the ad, than he is interested in the ad. As long as you don't trick the user to click the ad (product pictures, make the add look like navigation, and such) it's ok to blend the ads as you wish. It has no importance if the user understands that it is or it is not an ad - it is a link that goes to something he's interested in. As Shoemoney once said, the advertisers shoud create the ad text as honest as posible. If they have an ad like "free music" no wonder people click like crazy but don't buy 10 songs to get the 1 free song.
Okay, at this point I think I better come clean and let you all know that I used to be in the online adult business. I was only a small time operator making around $2000 per week. I even had one of my websites featured on Channel 4 TV in the UK. I can see many similarities between the attitudes of some AdSense "optimisers" and the porn barons of 10 years ago. Even some of the big boys were naive enough to think that building 1000's of websites every week (yes! every WEEK!) was the answer to job security and prosperity. They were foolish enough to ignore the old saying "what goes around comes around", and they inevitably perished in the end. What's funny about this thread is that I feel as though I've gone backwards in time and I'm re-living those days. Saying there's nothing wrong with trying to make as much money out of AdSense as possible is naive. There's a difference between wanting to make money from AdSense, and wanting to make as much money as possible from AdSense. It might be interesting to compare AdSense "page CTR". For instance: Yesterday mine was 4.60%.
Vai Lee I am not going to comment on your "view" on MFAs, that is covered many times over in DP. However having looked at your blog there is a fairly blatant TOS breach there. Its cleverly done but a breach (in my opinion) non the less. If its deliberate I am sure you know what I mean - if not PM me and I will show you. Maybe we can have a "spot the breach" competiton - sad, but Im a bit bored.
If the traffic is of low quality the advertisers will spend less and ultimatly find other ways of getting traffic. It's a free market and it will even out in the end. Right now adsense is the easiest way to make a living from the web (for me as a coder atleast). I know many people that swear by affiliate marketing but it just doesnt pay as good for me. I work actively to increase my affiliate earnings to have a stable ground but right now adsense is 1:10 in comparison. There is no need to "warn" for adsense, if there will be a decline it will be a gradually such (unless ofcourse you're a cheater and gets yourself banned).