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Google Adsense… In Decline?
By Anna Johnson on June 27th, 2009ReadWriteWeb recently published a thought-provoking article by Bernard Lunn questioning the long-term viability of Google’s Adsense advertising network… or at least indicating there were cracks in it.
According to ReadWriteWeb, Google Adsense is no longer fully meeting the needs of its three primary constituents: publishers, advertisers and consumers.
Publishers are seeing their revenues decline. Sure, the overall decrease in online advertising is affecting everyone right now, but as many people with Adsense driven sites would attest, Adsense revenues have been decreasing for some time now.
What’s more, Google still won’t tell anyone how much money per click they actually get. Presumably Google structures more transparent deals with larger content publishers, but the average website owner remains in the dark.
Advertisers, meanwhile, have found it notoriously difficult to profit from advertising in Google’s content network compared with advertising on the Google search engine results pages. And yet, advertisers continue to pay just as dearly for a click that is generally less valuable (i.e. tends to convert less) than the same click on the search results pages.
For their part, users are becoming increasingly blind to Adsense ads and are too often seeing irrelevant ads on the sites they visit.
That is, in a nutshell, my take on Bernard Lunn’s article (the article goes into much more depth and covers more ground than this).
So, is any of this true? Is Google Adsense broken and, if so, can it be fixed to the satisfaction of publishers, advertisers and users (and Google’s investors)?
Or are we merely seeing the inevitable imperfections in a network that continues to dominate the Internet advertising landscape – imperfections that Google is undoubtedly working to fix?
Source: Bernard Lunn, “AdSense: The (Weak) Elephant in the Room,” ReadWriteWEb, June 20, 2009
June 27th, 2009 at 5:38 am
I suppose some people are generating lower levels of income with their adsense campaigns, but this is not necessarily true for all. Certainly not true here
There is a recession on and advertisers are cutting down on their expenditure.
The savvy adsense webmaster knows he has to take his campaigns up a notch to adjust for these changes.
Is adsense in decline. Not likely
June 28th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
I think what we are seeing is an Internet version of what happens in the real world. There, we see conglomerates band together to dominate a market. In the 1960’s livestock trading companies combined until there were only 2 left. So big and unwieldy that no one got good service. So we had splinters breaking off to form more personalised service. So too, with sport. The former VFL had crowds of 50K at every game. Now AFL numbers are down to 30-40K for some games. Because there are other options available.
Same goes for Google. Once it was the only one. Now there is Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, Twittter etc. All appearing to give more personalised service. And it is service that matters. Perhaps more than results. The punter must feel appreciated. Google, by not releasing information, does not do that.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
I think it’s more than just the ads becoming invisible and dwindling revenue for content publishers. It doesn’t take long to find SCORES of people being burned on both sides of the coin without rhyme or reason from Google itself. There are literally THOUSANDS of examples via a simple search of bloggers and site owners having their accounts suspended out of the blue. Often, they’ve just racked up close to the threshold for payment or they’ve spent a year or more trying to get to that first payment by diligently driving their traffic up, only to have their account deleted mere weeks before reaching that hard-earned first payment. I simply do not understand how this can be tolerated. You’re allowing them onto your page, you’re letting them to use your valuable content (you do consider YOUR content valuable, don’t you?) to get eyeballs onto their ads and make THEM money, and yet it seems like there’s nothing we can do but roll over and let it happen. Then there’s the people paying for the ads themselves. I tried it for exactly ONE DAY before I realized that the whole system is heavily weighted in Google’s favor and they were not really doing me a ’service’ at all. They set the price, they tell you whether or not your ad is on topic, and they ride you for having bad click-through rates, and you have no way to prove or disprove any of this in relation to all the other adsense users. Watching my CTR fall and my prices slowly inch up, I deleted it and decided I’d just rather not use them at all. Look, Google’s motto might be “Do no evil”, but I think they’re rapidly becoming one of the most evil and insidious companies in the world. They’re PROVIDING A SERVICE, not doing us a favor. If you went into McDonald’s and ordered a #10, handed over your money, then, just before you’re going to get your food, a computer screen (not a person) tells you, “Sorry, you don’t comply with McDonald’s standards, we’ve deleted your order”, you’d probably go back with either a gun or your local news team to shame them for terrible business practices. A good service would be one that matches advertisers with blogs and sites in a way that uses reliable metrics and targeted content/customers and sets prices according, so neither side gets ripped off. Not these random BS adsense flow codes and google’s notorious ‘algorithms’.