Back before google took this big public stand against arbi MFA sites... and essentially keeping arbi sites out of adwords, as an advertiser I could essentially limit my exposure to MFA sites by opting out of the content network. Simple enough. Plus, when MFA sites were in vogue, google was making a much smaller amount per click because the ads getting clicked on were content network ads... not search network ads. So, what happens? All of the sites that used to be MFA and generate traffic from arbi ppc traffic on MSN, Yahoo, 7search etc.... are now a part of the google search network.... and instead of paying content network prices, I'm now paying full search prices. That's right. In my opinion, google has replaced the low paying content ads on arbi sites, with high paying search network ads. How? Infospace. Infospace is essentially a meta search engine that combines adwords and YPN results and then allows them to be distributed to webmasters via xml feed and otherwise to use on their arbi sites. Google allows this (so does yahoo) and the sites don't have to follow the traditional adsense rules... don't have to keep the adsense format or anything. They can display these results any way they wish (usually as normal looking search results) ... and when someone clicks, I as an advertiser pay adwords full price for the click as if it were on google.com So now, on low tier ppc engines like 7search, looksmart etc... the top positions are not held by MFA sites anymore... No, that wouldn't make google enough money. Instead they are held by arbi sites hosting my adwords through an xml feed from a "search partner" like infospace and others like them... and I am now paying google full price for the click. Nice one. Somebody probably got some pretty good stock options for dreaming up that trick. Don't believe me? Go to your favorite second tier ppc search engine... or search msn for some arbi term. Then check the results. The big arbi sites are all now displaying adwords ads... as search parnters, not as content partners. Examples: toseeka.com shopica.com findstuff.com thefreedictionary.com Now, I know a couple of you that own some of these types of sites... and hats off to you for infospace or whoever letting you use their service... but damn it's costing me some pretty good money as an advertiser in a high dollar adwords sector. I guarantee that google is making more from the present set-up for arbi through it's "look the other way policy" as their "search partners" distribute further down the food chain, than they did when MFA sites were in vogue. Essentially google is pretending to look the other way and saying.... "we don't allow webmasters to do MFA sites, and you have to strictly follow adsense rules to display adsense.... but our search partners can set whatever rules they want and redistribute our paid search results however they want." Now... I understand that I can opt out of the search partners. But then i am losing real search engines like aol. What makes me mad about this is that you assume that google uses good judgment in who is allowed to be a search network partner, so I usually opt in. But, when the partner is then allowed to further distribute, it takes it completely away from being google's judgment (which you might trust) and now you are asked to trust the judgment of the actual search partners on who they elect to distribute to. Of course their judgment is going to be to distribute to anyone that makes them money. I thought the point of the content network was that google had no control over the sites. Now, google doesn't even have control over the search partners. Hope someone can prove me wrong.
Ok, I'm going to back off slightly... but something is up. According to this page: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6119&topic=82 Infospace is a "content partner", not part of the search network... but, I have my doubts because... As a content partner, ads are selected by google based on the content on the page... thus, on my adsense pages, google looks at the content and decides which ads are displayed. However... on Infospace, and the sites it distributes its feed to... the ads are always the same ads (although intermingled with Yahoo ads) that appear as paid ads in the google search results for the exact same search. Thus, if you do a google search for "cars", then go to infospace or one of the arbi sites... the results are the same as if you intermingled the paid listings for the search result... not based upon the content of the page. Which leads me to conclude that they are being fed actual paid results for a search term query, not based on and analysis of page content. I'm just not sure yet if opting out of content also keeps me out of the infospace sites.... and whether I am paying content rates or search rates for those listings. But again, my main problem with it is google letting a partner redistribute the product and not require the websites to follow content partner rules for adsense. It's like the webmaster can say... this violates adsense TOS, so I'll get the same stuff from a content partner rather than google directly and I can use it in complete violation of adsense TOS.
Good points. I read somewhere recently that being in the search network means you show up in searches on myspace, which is known for its low-converting users.