I just wanted to get some opinions about how it seems as if Google is digging their self into a hole they may never climb out of. I've heard of many million+ dollars per year accounts being suspended, and from a buisness point of view it seems that if google keeps losing their big spenders they may find their self in trouble in a few years. Some may say it'll never happen, but look at it this way. The more rules they make, the more people they have to hire to enforce these rules, the more they gotta pay out for wages. The more rules they make, the more advertisers they lose. Especially affiliates, who are the biggest spenders due to the large profit margin from affiliate marketing. The more rules they make, the more advertisers search for alternate PPC engines, which drives up the demand for PPC advertisers and in return we may see a large variety of medium-low volume PPC providers slowly popping up to meed the needs of advertisers. Cuz as we spend more on the other guy, the other guy earns more money to expand and become larger. We need someone to start a new search engine, maybe by getting a crapload of servers, and having their own robots scour Google while indexing all of googles pages over to their search index. This would level the playing field pretty quickly I think. Anyway, I think google is gonna regret trying to "regulate small business" so much and maybe they'll smarten up and start ignoring complaints about ad quality and quit being so prissy about their self image. If I was google, I wouldnt give a lick about people complaining what kind of ad's i'm showing, they can go find another search engine to use if they dont like the ads, or the more common sense approach DONT CLICK ON THEM!
they can go find another search engine to use if they dont like the ads, or the more common sense approach DONT CLICK ON THEM! - whuch is exactly what they don't want, and exactly why they are cracking down. Google got to be the biggest search engine because users found their results more relevant - they get people to pay to pay for ads because people will click on them and find what they want. Google exists for searchers - that's their raison d'etre, advertisers will pay them money because they know they get more searchers than all the other search engines put together. They can afford to piss off a few - even thousands - even millions - of viagra affiliates. They can't afford to piss off millions of searchers.
I wouldn't say there has been _many_ million dollar accounts suspended. There however has been many thousand+ dollar per month accounts suspended. I believe the vast majority have probably been 100-dollar or less per month accounts. Million dollar accounts are few and far between. As for needing people to enforce the rules, a lot of it is automatic. Things are flagged for someone to review, other times, it's straightforward and no human is needed. Sure, more would be needed now to keep the line moving. But things will get back to a normal level for Google really soon I would think. Therefore, no new bodies are needed. I understand what you are trying to say but it just won't happen. Not any time soon in my opinion anyway. Here's why. Google has the largest share of search engine use. That's not going to change soon. Why? Because they offer a superior product, plain and simple, or at least the perception of the better product. It's like McDonalds and Wendys. The latter may have the better hamburgers but three times as many people flock to McD. Google has done the same with their product and savvy marketing. My kids always say let's go to McDonalds, even if we end up going elsewhere. My 11-year-old uses Google and I doubt she's much aware of other search engines. So Google is used the most. This means that those wishing to advertise online will go where the traffic is. That's at Google. Sure some will go to Yahoo and the others but Google is where they will make most of their money. Note that has nothing to do with what you think of Google's advertising medium and its rules. Unless some other company can offer as good a product and market it properly, we don't need another major search engine. There's three right now (two arguably). Besides, there's no company with the technical know how as well as the money, not to mention the willingness, to overtake Google, Yahoo and MSN. I doubt few companies would be willing to take that risk. The existing smaller players will not make that much more money than they did last year. They don't meet the needs of advertisers as you imply because of Google's market share as explained above. Therefore, none will overtake Google, let alone Yahoo, for the time being. No, they won't regret it. In fact, they will likely grow and the others will follow their lead. As Magda said, they can't afford to piss off millions of searchers.
As far as the future is concerned, I think Adwords will move to dealing directly with more and more large businesses and agencies. The system may be seen as less useful to small businesses (directly) over time.
Actually, i think that the fact that you described are correct but your conclusions are wrong: Google will not need more workers to implement their new rules as almost everything is doing automatically. and just small portion done manually. Google stop accounts - well, I think that the opposite is true. While we as affiliate receive clicks from Google, we do all in our power to offer the users that gets in to our sites variety of appropriate options, so once user gets in to our site he will check several merchants (And will not need to go back searching in Google), meaning from each click we are getting to our sites we are getting few clicks out. Now think of a world with no affiliates, user will have to click on all the sponsor links/ or at least few in Google and then Google will earn more (each user click on several ads).
IMO Google like to keep big advertisers happy. They're the ones that get assigned Google reps and have a direct line to someone at Google dealing with their account. Adwords keeps getting more complicated to manage so there'll be a shift towards agencies as independent, small advertisers just won't have the expertise to manage campaigns successfully.
>>The more rules they make, the more people they have to hire to enforce these rules, the more they gotta pay out for wages Wrong - as others have said it's mostly automatic >>The more rules they make, the more advertisers they lose. Especially affiliates, who are the biggest spenders due to the large profit margin from affiliate marketing. Correct with the first part - more rules inevitably means less advertisers. Totally wrong on the second - affiliates make up a very small % of G's business, and the vast majority of affiliates are small fry spending less than $500 pm >>The more rules they make, the more advertisers search for alternate PPC engines, which drives up the demand for PPC advertisers and in return we may see a large variety of medium-low volume PPC providers slowly popping up to meed the needs of advertisers. Cuz as we spend more on the other guy, the other guy earns more money to expand and become larger Right in one way - advertisers may look at other options. Totally wrong in your final conclusion though - advertising is only ever as good as its reach - G easily has the lion's share of search users, the recent purge of affiliates actually makes user experience better = more / retained users = advertisers