adsense
November 30th, 2007 at 09:37am
Under adsense
Ever since it started, Google AdSense prohibited adult content. Explicit nudity, for example, was (and is) way beyond Google’s terms of service.
But of course, there is a lot of content that is bordering on the mature content line. In fact, some webmasters play the gamy of trying to get more page views by intentionally bordering on that line. I suspect, they get their revenue from advertisers who are also close to violating the AdWords TOS. AdWords, too, prohibits explicit ads.
Google seems now to go after them. The have written an interesting post in their blog: “Inside AdSense: Play it safe, family-safe“. In short, Google replaces the “explicit” term with “familiy-safety”. This in itself is more explanatory. But Google also provides a view good questions that a webmaster should ask himself:
Would I be comfortable viewing this content with my parents or children in the same room? Would I feel comfortable viewing this content if my boss walked up behind me while I had this content on my screen?
Of course, the level of comfortability varies from person to person. But I think the questions pretty much get to the point.
And if I may engage in some wild guessing: Google’s blog post could be the beginning of a campaign against webmasters (probably as well as advertisers) playing the “mature content game”. It looks a bit like Google is cleaning up its portfolio, just like they began to seriously penalize paid links. So if you have close-to-adult material and you are running AdSense ads, its probably a good time now to reconsider using AdSense.
From a general point of view (as citizen, parent(!) and AdWords advertiser, …) I think I welcome this change. I don’t like explicit AdWords ad to come up on my site. And I don’t like my family-friendly ads come up on explicit sites.
By Rainer
November 23rd, 2007 at 11:46am
Under adsense
Google has announced in its adsense blog that Adsense Video Units are now being rolled out to the UK, Ireland and Canada. They also speak from good success in the US market (but what else should they say?;)).
The key reasoning behind this move is probably that Google likes to keep the Video Unit experiment limited to the English-language market and also a market that has at least some of the same cultural believes. From a marketing and testing point of view, that makes much sense to me.
What I would like to see, however, is that publishes (like me ;)) targeting these markets also get a chance to show video units - even though they may not reside in these countries. As I am from Germany, this probably does not happen. But a lot of my pages address exactly the clientèle Google is looking into.
Well… let’s wait. At least my sites are prepared for the Video ad formats.
By Rainer
November 12th, 2007 at 04:51pm
Under adsense
I started a dual experiment today. I got a microsite up on the US greencard lottery. The site is in German, targets the German marke (the first “first”) and is site with less than 10 pages (the second “first”). I came along this topic when I searched for travel-related keywords and the greencard lottery was quite popular. So I thought I give it a try.
Even though there is few content, the content that is there is valid and well researched. So I hope it will not be qualified as a MFA site. I am also very curios how the German market works. Promoting that site is probably not easy, but that’s an important lesson to learn.
I keep you posted on the outcome. Any comments are appreciated. If I get any decent traffic, I intend to add a few more pages to the site, but my goal is that it remains at ten at most. After all, there is not much more that could be written about this topic …
By Rainer
October 9th, 2007 at 09:51am
Under adsense
I just read an interesting post in Google’s AdSense blog. Google is introducing so-called video units. You can now place select utube videos on your site and get paid for doing so. I have already seen a view of these utube videos on the web. What I saw looks much like the usual TV commercial. I guess it will not only influence web site monetization, but the overall way the web is experienced (be it for good or bad…).
The new feature is a very interesting move. In fact, it resembles the traditional broadcast model, where the broadcaster is paid some money for distributing the ad. I wonder if that also means utube will share some of its income with the creators of quality video. I am asking this, because I assume ads will most probably be embedded into quality content, so that people actually watch the video.
I’ll see…
Google Announcement: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/10/introducing-video-units.html
By Rainer
October 8th, 2007 at 08:34am
Under adsense+ adwords
I tried to use AdWords to drive traffic to my blog, in turn generating AdSense revenue. By now, I know that this practice is somewhat in doubt and Google doesn’t really like it. However, as my blog contains original content, it was probably OK to do so - even Google itself buys traffic, so why shouldn’t I?
But… When I started the experiment, I thought that it would not make much sense. And in fact, this proved true. I can see some search clicks and I can also see increased traffic from them. Also, I can see increased AdSense clicks, which I think are related to the previous AdWords klicks. But: I spent more on AdWords than I got revenue with AdSense. Of course, my experiment has limited scope and my keywords are not very competitive. But all in all, it looks like the AdWords game seems to not work well. However, it is a great way to drive in traffic to a new site. And if it has content and maybe something to sell besides AdSense, then it will for sure make sense.
By Rainer
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:37am
Under adsense+ mfa
I just found an interesting article on MFA (”Made for AdSense”) sites on the web. It basically shares my concerns about this artificial traffic source. Also, google seems to go after it, so it is probably not a business model you would like to pursue if you’d like to stay in business for a longer period of time…
http://www.seonewsblog.com/google-goes-after-mfa-sites-with-adsense-arbitrage
The post tells that a large number of AdSense publishers got banned by Google for using MFA sites.
By Rainer
October 1st, 2007 at 10:53am
Under adsense+ adwords
I have just enabled AdSense inside the picture gallery of my personal site. The gallery is mostly about astronomy, space and some other definitely non-adult themes. As a reminder: AdSense is Google’s program for publishers that enables them to show relevant ads on their site and thus get paid a little bit for their hard work.
When we enabled AdWords, the result was stunning: there were a lot of softcore pr0n ads (or other “soft” adult oriented sites). After quick thinking, the solution was very clear: AdSense, in absence of better information, uses the URL for guessing keywords. And in the URL, there was the term “gallery” (pointing to the gallery module). Now, for Google was everything clear: if it is a gallery, the site must be adult-oriented. And if you know Google, you know that any such matching is based on usage stats. In other words: the average Internet (search) users associates the term “gallery” with adult-oriented material. Do you like some evidence? Sure, just see this screenshot below (click image for a better-to-read hi-res version):
As you can see, the picture was all about technical things, related to space shuttle processing.
Thankfully, Google’s AdSense crawler was quite quick. After a 15 minutes or so, relevant ads begun to appear and the adult-oriented ones were no longer seen. Check yourself and try out today’s relevant ads for that very same page:
http://www.gerhards.net/Gallery-sts120-pic-sts_120_vab_no_mlp.phtml
The bad news, though, is that AdSense seems to crawl quickly only pages that are being accessed. So I now need to either access all of my gallery content or need to life with the fact that for a couple of days people will get, well, confusing ads. I hope, however, that AdSense will crawl the rest of the site now so that this is only a temporary problem. Anyhow, I need to keep an eye on it (if you look at my site, I guess you fully understand why I don’t like these adult-oriented ads to be on it).
If everything else fails, I’ll filter out ads in my AdSense account, but this is only a last resort thing to do, as it is
a) a lot of work
b) prone to error
Issue b) is especially problematic as new ads pop up every day, so you need to keep everything updated - IMHO nothing that you can really manage to do. So it is also in Google’s best interest to keep things relevant. After all, I’d need to remove the ads if I can’t find a way to permanently get such ads out of my site.
In any case, to me it is an interesting find that “gallery” seems to be associated with adult-oriented content for the average Internet user…
Side note: I first found the effect on the gallery home page (at http://www.gerhards.net/Gallery.phtml. Due to the size of that page, I could not create a screen shot. So I used an actual picture instead, where the effect can be neatly shown (see above). It is also noteworthy that other urls clearly showed Google used the URL content for keyword targeting. For example, there is a section on the strut repair done at space shuttle Discovery (on STS-120 mission). These URLs contain the word “strut” in them. Not surprisingly, all ads were about mechanical things. There were other samples, too. So there a clear relationship between the URL and the ads. After the AdSense crawler has crawled the page, actual page content is used for targeting. And it seems to crawl pages rather quickly (well done, Google…).
By Rainer