As anyone who reads me often knows, I hate Google, or any search engine, full of crap. I made my entry into this industry being able to legitimately populate Google, Alta Vista and Yahoo with great content pages and sites.
In my early years using a platform called ViaWeb which then evolved into Yahoo Store, now Yahoo Merchant Solutions – there weren’t any rules. People were just kind of making them up, that’s how I ended up explaining search engines and spiders in Catalog magazine in 1999. Only 7 years ago, but a lifetime ago online.
Google, of course, is caught in a catch-22. If they restrict the sites running their offers, they reduce their revenue. If they reduce their revenue, then they can’t continue to build 20 applications at the same time and have to focus on their core competency, which currently is not being able to filter “shit from shinola” in their db. The number of auto-gen pages scares me that are found online, generated from the US Geological Society and Census and other data readily available online – generally at no cost.
People, there is a way to do this properly – but just like the rest of the lazy bastards of America who think that AdSense is a life-long retirement program for them – they are wrong. You gotta play by the rules or you’ll get burned. Once the CPA network for Google goes live (supposedly they have already emailed invitation to people), they are going to get bad feedback from some of their merchants – they may blow what they are doing for their merchants out of the water – it’s going to be an interesting roll-out.
Being in the ad industry, I know what it’s like to get calls from Advertisers to stop a single affiliate from running a campaign or talk about the bad data another is processing through to the offer. Affiliates will try ANYTHING to circumvent the system, but they cannot be allowed. Having to restrict Google’s programs by individual Advertisers will be an interesting foray as well.
Although lots of specifics haven’t been given on the new Google CPA program, it mentions only actionable items, including shopping. Does this mean that now Google can leverage their Froogle database via affiliate programs and custom-cut rev share deals for all the online merchants? Do you like having shopping results separate? I don’t.
Well, it’s interesting as the Internet continues to evolve. We are in Web 2.0, Web 3.0 is on the horizon, and I’m not exactly sure what else is in store for us.
All web searchers know how tough it is to find your way through the maze of “Made-for-Adsense� junkyards. It is obvious that the proliferation of contextual advertising, such as Google Adsense and Yahoo! Publisher Network, is to blame. It is basically free money available to anyone who can generate clicks on ads.
Whether it is an actual human clicking on the ad through a search engine listing or any of the rampant click fraud networks of computers, the rise of easy money on the web may soon be it’s downfall if the engines cannot learn to determine the real content from the fake.
The painful question to both shareholders and webmasters is, why would the advertising programs like Adsense want to eliminate these sites that generate so many clickthroughs? The advertisers are pacified because the traffic is somewhat targeted, the junk-site webmasters are happy because they are getting paid, but is the searching public satisfied with the results? Gone are the days of search results full of actual user-generated content, welcome to the new age brought on by PPC advertising � the age of Web Misinformation.
[ Quote Source: Monetize ]
