Sacred Cows of "the Internets"

People are starting to get ticked off at Google. Someone tipped me off to www.fuckedgoogle.com recently.

What has happened to Adsense? 18 months ago many publishers used to earn fifty cents to a dollar per click on average. Some clicks earned as much as $2. These days it's well under a dime a click. In fact, many clicks for the same ads now generate as little as 3 cents a click according to the webmaster grapevine.

Yes, it's basically the same collection of advertisers as before. Same sites too. But the earnings for publishers have sunk like stones in a pond.

Meanwhile, Adword rates are climbing while their performance is sinking as well. One of our sites used to have a sales conversion rate of 1%, which is not bad. Now that very same site (nothing else has changed) has about 1 sale for every 450 Adwords clicks.

In a nutshell, Adsense revenues used to cover Adwords expenses for many sites. Not no more, folks. Now Adwords costs real money and webmasters are starting to explore their options.

I am hearing this lament from scores of website owners.

Fortunately, serious competition for both Adwords and Adsense is finally starting to arrive which promises to end the de facto Google monopoly in online advertising.

Comments

[Mike T]

" One of our sites used to have a sales conversion rate of 1%, which is not bad. Now that very same site (nothing else has changed) has about 1 sale for every 450 Adwords clicks."

Here's my take on this deterioration. By the time a surfer lands on your site, he/she has most likely already seen all the ads on the Google pages. For most categories of products and services there are only a small number of advertisers (<15).

[me]

Since google does not disclose either the bids on keywords or the percentage of the rake that they keep, they are free to take whatever amount they think they can get away with.

With their overall revenue falling, it is easy to "keep" more of the rake in order to meet their quarterly targets for wall street.

it's all a huge scam, just like enron, and it's going to collapse.

[がるのもあまり好きではない]

Apparently Google went evil over the past year:

http://www.realmeme.com/Main/savinggoogle/index.jsp

(This is a histogram of keywords appearing on Internet sites which correspond to a belief, technology, product or company. If a product or technology is useful, people write about it. Then their friends write about it. Soon, a trend appears that can be captured in a time-series graph.

Memegraphs can identify areas of rapid growth for job and investment opportunities.
Memegraphs can also identify areas to avoid.

The goal is to identify an opportunity after its risky startup period, but before its rate of growth slows.)

Wake up Google, people perception is getting sour on you? Time to strike out all this "evil" pages from your index. Don't be shy - it's about your hype. Follow the CNET example.