There are two major changes to AdSense:

(1) Google now requires AdSense publishers to comply with “the spirit” of the AdWords Page Quality Guidelines.
(2) You can place up to three link units on a page.

Number one might hold a few valuable clues about how to make more money out of Adsense, as Google continues to clamp down on junk content.

Interesting post on the Adsense Blog. They’re asking webmasters not to advise Google if they accidentally click on an ad.

Google claim to already know you’ve done so, and have discounted it.

“As most of you know, our program policies state that publishers are not permitted to click on their own ads for any reason. For this reason, we’ve received many emails from publishers letting us know that they’ve accidentally clicked on their own ads. If you’re one of these publishers, we truly appreciate the efforts you’ve made to monitor your account and keep it in good standing. However, we do understand that an accidental click may occur from time to time, so there’s no need to contact us each instance this occurs.

Because we closely monitor all account activity using engineering systems and thorough human analysis, chances are we’ve already detected your clicks on your ads and discounted them. While these clicks still show in your reports, we filter out their associated earnings so that advertisers aren’t charged. However, please keep in mind that we don’t ignore the clicks completely; if it appears to us that a publisher has been clicking on his own ads to inflate his earnings or an advertiser’s costs, we may disable the account to protect our advertisers’ interests“.

Wonder how that’s done….

Nick Carr makes some good points about Google’s strengths, and their weaknesses.

“To competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo, Google must seem like a greased pig. You can see the damned thing running amok in your garden, but you can’t figure out a good way to get hold of it“

The beauty of Adwords, in terms of defensibility, is that Adwords uses an auction model. It can’t be underpriced.

“Schmidt: Another example of Sergey [Brin]’s observations is that our advertising network is very powerful because it’s quite resistant to certain competitive attacks.

Vogelstein: Such as?

Schmidt: Because it’s an auction market you cannot under-price it. This point is lost on many, many people.“

However, Carr identifies an area where Google might be vulnerable: Adsense payouts.

 ”Introduce a free version of AdSense. By free, I mean that you tell publishers that if they run your ads on their sites, they get to keep all the advertising revenues. 100 percent. You won’t take any cut. Immediately, you put a lot of pricing pressure on an important source of revenues and profits for Google.“

This is certainly an initiative many publishers could get on board with. Google would be forced to compete on payouts.

However, Yahoo and MSN would also need the volume of advertisers. And they’d need to get off their behinds and actually provide an international distributed ad network . Adsense was rolled out internationally - when? 2003?

It’s now 2007.

Where is MSN? Where are Yahoo (internationally)?

Well, some of them.

It’s been reported that Google have been closing numerous Adsense accounts, and some people have been speculating it’s due to a new crackdown on arbitrage tactics. Without a copy of the email, it’s difficult to know for sure.

From WebmasterWorld:

” know of two associates who were doing arbitrage and yes they got the same email on the 15th…..their accounts will be disabled June 1st. These guys were sending adwords traffic to their landing pages. From what I saw their landing pages had good content but were a MFA site with two blocks of adsense code at the top and one at the bottom. No other external links on the page”.

Somehow, I doubt it’s due to arbitrage. It’s more likely due to non-performance, from the advertisers point-of-view.

Arbitrage can provide value - there are examples all over the web, and offline. Advertising buys, local search, affiliate, e-bay stores, and, yes - major search engines - all use arbitrage, to a degree. Arbitrage is a given in any inefficient marketplace - which is all of them.

As far as Adsense goes, it will come down to how the arbitrage is implemented. If there is no value provided to the advertiser, expect to get canned by Google eventually, arbitrage or otherwise. Google have made no secret of the fact that their philosophy orients around providing utility to the end-user, and that includes PPC advertisers. Many made-for-adsense sites provide no utility whatsoever.

So, less to do with arbitrage. More to do with publishing page-after-page of nothing but Adsense, methinks.

This information appeared in my feed reader:

“Looks like this is going to be plastered all over the internet in the next few hours. http://cache.valleywag.com/assets/resources/20070228-132956-fmconfcall.mp3 half way through Battelle annouces a deal with google and says that google takes a 15% adserving fee and then pays out 51% of the remaining 85% leaving you with ~43% net payout…..“

The source post appears to have been pulled, however, but the information is in the wild. The original conference call is still (at the time of writing) live here: http://cache.valleywag.com/assets/resources/20070228-132956-fmconfcall.mp3

The part where the details of the estimated Adsense revenue share is mentioned is slightly less than halfway through. According to the call, FM negotiated a better deal than the figures stated above (…google takes a 15% adserving fee and then pays out 51% of the remaining 85% leaving you with ~43% net payout) directly with Google.

Could just still be an estimate, of course.

In theory, there has always been a perceived vulnerability for sabotage in Google Adsense. Check out this amusing threat Shoemoney received.

“This is a warning and if you don’t pay attention to it you will suffer from bad turns.
All your income is through Google Adsense and if you do not cooperate with us we will stop this income source. We would like you to pay us the total amount of USD 200 each month…. If you do not pay this amount we will have to close your account by the help of special robots…“

Not only is there potential for using rogue bots on your site, saboteurs could use your code on other sites.

However, Barry has spotted some reassuring noises from Google:

“But regarding adsense abuse, our fraud team is pretty thorough. We wouldn’t automatically assign culpability to the account holder, as we know where clicks are coming from….people are not allowed to transplant the code to their site without your permission; if someone has used it without your consent please let us know“

I like these before-and-after comparisons. This one illustrates a truism about effective Adsense placement - look like navigation, don’t look like banners.

“Recently, Julie experimented with optimizing her link unit ad placement. She removed the existing 120×90 link unit from the uppermost right corner of her pages, and instead placed a 468×15 link unit at the top of her articles. In doing so, Julie found a convenient, unobtrusive location and saw her readers naturally gravitating towards the link unit. Her efforts led to an immediate doubling of her revenue — an increase that has been sustained since the move“

Yesterday, I blogged about the rather vague “Placement Packs” email I, and it seems, many others, received over the weekend.

I got some clarification from Google today.

Well, I say clarification, however the reply is still a little cryptic. Google advise that the type of ads I “could” expect to see on my site “could” look like this.

Video, in other words, in 300×250 format.

I can’t really see my existing sites being the right place for this kind of advertising, but it’s probably worth experimenting with, especially if advertisers are willing to part with more dollars.

I’ll let you know how I get on….within the Adsense terms and conditions, of course

Did anyone else get an email from Google Adsense (supposedly)? The email asks you to consider placing a different sized Adsense advertising units on your pages:

“Custom placement packs are selections of individually-reviewed sites designed for our largest brand advertisers. We would like to feature your site more frequently in these advertiser packages, but to do so, we need you to place more image and text-enabled medium rectangle ad units (300×250) on your site. Visit https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats to see a sample of the medium rectangle unit. The medium rectangle is the most demanded size among our brand advertisers that utilize these packages for both text and image ads. These advertisers want to ensure they reach visitors on high quality sites like yours, and are willing to bid more for ads prominently displayed on these sites. They require that the units be placed “above the fold” on a page so that the ads are immediately visible to your site’s visitors without scrolling down”.

The email sounds a bit rushed, and is short on detail.

I notice that a few forum posters have said they received this same e-mail.

Anyone else?

The more people I talk to, the more I keep hearing this:

Revenue from running Adsense isn’t what it once was.

Aaron has a good post on the topic: Google Adsense as A Terrible Business Model.

Aaron puts it down to:

• Smart Pricing (or Maybe Dumb Publishing?)
• A Glut of Publishing
• Newspaper & Magazine Archives: More Glut
• Frothy Ad Market
• A Lack of Competition
• Google’s General Arrogance
• Potential Text Ad Blindness

I also think the clicks just aren’t worth as much. Traffic is up, yet revenue is down. Like what happened to the banner ad market.

Adsense is great as backfill, and is easy to implement, but there are often more lucrative things to do with traffic.