Tuesday, October 27, 2009

7 Reasons Why Google AdSense Sucks (JohnChow.com)

I don't agree with few of below points as mentioned by John Chow.

#1) The CPM’s are Weak

Yes CPM’s are dropping everywhere and the days of $50CPM are distant memories, but the CPM’s with AdSense always seem to be low. Why is it that the CPM’s suck if you are publisher, and the CPC are so high when you are on the other side as an advertiser? Oh yah, they have a market cap of $175,000,000,000. Yes that is 175 billion with 9 zeros. Why don’t they share publicly what percentage of the revenue they actually give to the publishers? Can you think of a reason why they would hide this? Every single ad Network and every single affiliate company in the world tells you what percentage payout they give you. Google is the only one that doesn’t. What kind of partner, doesn’t share that information with you? It should be illegal not to disclose.

#2) They Look Like Crap

This one is baffling more than anything. How can a company with over 20,000 employees not come up with a banner that looks more ascetically pleasing to the eye? The customizations are weak. Colors and rounded corners? Come on G, come up with slick looking ads! Even the Graphic ads, have the self promotion, ‘Ads by Google’ that makes them look ugly. Do you really need to advertise AdSense more? Thousands of top bloggers have pulled them off their site for the simple reason of how bad they look on their site, and you should too if you want your site to look more professional.

#3) Inverse Relationship to Revenue

After meeting and talking to hundreds of site owners over the years and meeting folks who say they either make money or don’t make money off AdSense, I come to this conclusion. AdSense revenue is inversely related to the quality of your content. If you have great content, readers are going to stick around your site and read more but if you content quality is weak they are going to keep looking elsewhere and click on the Google Ads with the keywords of what they are really looking for. So if you have keyword rich weak content, you will actually make more money with AdSense.

#4) PSA’s

Also known as Public Service Ads, these ads show up when Google can’t find a match for your site, and they normally only show up when you have the default set to display only graphical ads. OK, I can be as charitable as the next guy, but not only do you not make any money off these ads, they look like crap. I’ve yet to see a nicely designed PSA. Here is a tip to all you charities out there, hire a professional designer, or get a professional graphic designer to ‘donate’ his services and get some nice looking banner ads designed. Otherwise, keep those lousy PSA’s off my site.

#5) Anyone is Approved

This is the biggest joke with AdSense and the reason that the web is filled with millions of completely useless shitty sites. AdSense is the cause. Yes, the biggest search engine in the world, the folks who pride themselves on “helping your organize information” is the #1 culprit of enabling anyone to create a crap site and make money off it. Anyone can put up a website, plagiarize, steal and copy content and then slap on AdSense ads to potentially make a few bucks. Almost every single ad network in the world has some type of approval process and quality control, but not AdSense, everyone is welcome. Why? Google’s revenue is the ultimate long tail and those hundreds of millions of spammers are all soldiers in Google’s revenue army, all splogging and generating pennies that add up to billions.

#6) It Makes You Lazy

AdSense is a crutch for the lazy publisher. It is kind of like crack cocaine, when you get a small taste of it, you keep coming back for more, even when you know it is bad for you. You think, oh well, at least it is some money. I never hear anyone saying. OMG, I am making a killing off AdSense on my ONE site! The few bucks you get a month keeps you on a drip feed life support so you don’t go out and sell your own ads.

#7) They keep your Money

This is one of the things that really irks me with Google and should make you mad too. How many millions of dollars of other people’s money do they have in the bank that they will never pay out? They used to have a lower payouts lever and now it needs to be $100. I guarantee that there are litterly millions of small publishers with super low traffic that will NEVER hit the minimum payout level and just give up or remove it from their site. What happens to this money? Google keeps it. Hmm? I’m guessing that the guy in the 3rd world country with the $38 dollars sitting idle in his account needs the money more than they do? They should be forced to pay out all monies owning to small site owners!

Enough is enough. Let’s convince Google to disclose what percentage of your revenue they keep and force them to pay out all monies owed to small site owners.

How much money is sitting in your AdSense Account?

Posted Here

Friday, October 16, 2009

Beware of Phishing Attack on Google Adsense accounts


With all of the talk about Adsense users finding their accounts disabled lately, users should be aware of a phishing scam playing on Adsense clients’ greatest fear: losing their account.

Today I received an email purporting to be from Google telling me my account was disabled. And frankly, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to falling for a phishing attempt. That’s partly do to circumstance and partly because the scam is fairly well done.

On the circumstance side, I had an unusually high number of clicks on one of my sites yesterday. It seemed to good to be true, so I was afraid something was amiss.

On the scam side, the phishers appear to have copied an actual email Google uses to inform users their accounts have been disabled. Or at least something very close. There’s no broken English. Here’s what it says:

Hello,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense
account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since
keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our
advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the
interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We
realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance
for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we’ve taken,
please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by
visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

The email came from adsense-adclicks-noreply@google.com, which apparently is a real Google email address that it uses to contact customers, at least according to a couple blog posts. (Surprisingly, Gmail didn’t warn me that the email was actually sent from someone other than the return address like it usually does. But it did put the message in my spam folder.)

But there are a few problems with the email. First, there’s no email address in the ‘to’ line. Second, it just addresses me as “hello”, rather than a name.

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