Yes, but they're still mostly reliant on automated systems. I'm not saying you can completely automate the system, but I think Google's trying hard to minimize the human involvement. Otherwise they run into the problem Yahoo had: it doesn't scale well....
Adsense makes it more worth while for people to reinvent the wheel in hopes of a better result. This has created businesses which seel adsense ready websites, which feeds into low cost domain name registrars, which feeds into low cost web hosting and/or colocation servers. The thought strikes me that feeding the mediocrity boom may generate more revenue than adding to it!
How exactly will Google be able to tell the difference? And even if they did, why would Google give these types of sites the worst returns when the returns are based on however much the advertiser is bidding on the ad? That theory sounds completely illogical as well as vague.
Well if all them people want to join adsense and make their own adsense sites just let them do it. Im sure most of them will fail. Not only that it will get harder to get more traffc with all the competition. I also dont quite get what people have against adsense made websites. People visit the website, click on the ad that interests them, advertiser gets a targeted visitor, adsense gets its cut, publisher gets a click. Its not like such website would survive long anyway.
Actually, Google has to do nothing to keep the system working. The free market does everything for them (and us). First, if too many sites become spammy, advertisers will pull their money out -- causing the spammy sites to go away. Eventually (and rather quickly) the spammy sites and the advertisers find a balance. This happens naturally as profits go up and down to find an equilibrium. Second, if Google tries to judge sites, they do a disservice to the advertisers and the content creators. I'd rather see advertisers judging sites by setting their marketing prices. I would like to see Google add one more tier to their content tiers -- maybe something between their premium publisher and their average publishers. I'd like to see advertisers have an option to see what sites their ad was placed on (not necessarily which sites had a click). Advertisers can rate the site, and sites with a high rating get preference over sites without a rating. Negative ratings shouldn't penalize sites, they should just stay in the "regular" AdSense publishing tier. Third, we're seeing a huge growth of AdSense publishers jumping in the fray. This increases the supply of publishers, decreasing the demand on readers, and decreasing the supply of good ads -- prices therefore drop. After these guys find out they can't make good money, they'll leave. How long will a guy work for $0.25 per hour before he realizes he can do more elsewhere. I publish for vanity and to get my thoughts out of my head and into the market. AdSense is just a tip jar, but I believe it can supplement my real income quickly. My blogs and my sites help me raise my billable rate to my real life customers, and as my blogs make more money, I can raise my billable rate even more until no one wants to hire me anymore (free market economics). If you publish for an income, you'll generally be sorely disappointed. Every see how many publishers are out there? Millions. Know how many are active daily? Thousands. The difference is those who give up -- thankfully as the numbers of people trying to make a quick buck go up, it puts pressure on the rest to see if it is worth it to work through the bubble.
Hi Those are good points, but the 'publishers' being discussed are simply using some rss feed bots to publish other peoples information to fill their site. They probably only visit their own site once a month. That ticks me off when I see my rss feed on someone elses site. The link is there to visit my site (usually) but they must still be picking up a few cents here and there, and when you have a couple of hundred sites all working the same then they make an income. Its those sites which need addressing. Hopefully google can address this with the penalty for duplicate content. They will be able to see where the info was published first and make sure that site is higher in the searches. Its not just google which needs to sort this. In the bloggin world, technorati is full of spammy blog sites. Andy