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Good post, and of course he is right. We need to discourage everyone from using Google's Ad Manager. They know too much already.
Re: The rest of the story
Well, I’m sorry Seth, but this is still really dumb.
“My point was that if everyone started clicking, clickthrough rates would go up. For a while, there'd be an imbalance, and sites would make too much and advertisers would pay too much.
But then, advertisers would use the landing pages to start converting.”
Hmm, so as an advertiser I should pay more now so that other advertisers can benefit in the long run (when things balance out again.) All we have to do is change the mindset of web surfers so they click on ads more often.
Changing the mindset of web surfers would be like government deficit spending in Keynesian economics. The government goes into debt, but it stimulates the economy.
I’m not buying it. There are already too many users who click on ads they have little interest in. The great thing about Internet advertising is that it is targeted, not directed at the masses the way TV is. Turn it into mass advertising, and it’s a different game. Advertisers already have motivation to improve their conversion pages. We don’t need to barrage them with more low quality clicks to make them try to be better salespeople.
"In the long run this will help advertisers. Right now they pay more for clicks because there are so few of them. If click through rates go up in general, the cost will come down as supply expands. Advertisers can then work on their conversions rather than relying upon people to self select."
Are you trolling? Nobody believes this.
I remember a couple years ago someone bragging on webmasterworld that when he likes a site he clicks on their AdSense ads to tip the author. You might expect this type of thing from the people at the webmasterworld AdSense forum, but you'd think Seth Godin would know better.
Story: Sphinning out of Control
Sphinn isn't nearly as bad as some. The venerable Nature publishing group had a social bookmarking site called www.dissectmedicine.com for medical stories. It was absolutely packed with spam. They had no way to vote stories down or to report spam. Most of the stories were people promoting diets or selling snake oil. A couple months ago Nature gave up on it; it had gotten so out of control.
"remarkable stat that less than half of Yahoo's paid search clicks happen on its own search sites"
Remarkable stat? Hardly surprising to anyone who has been paying attention for the past several years. And 45% of clicks come from yahoo.com? That's very high. I'd be happy if I could get 25% of the clicks from yahoo.com. My blocked domain list is maxxed out.
Yahoo flew a bunch of us advertisers out last year for a Click Quality Summit where they talked about improvements in the works. These were advertisers who spend a lot and complain a lot. It's widespread problem that many advertisers recognize. And YSM has improved somewhat in the past year or so. I don't see the obvious fraud or excessive clicks from arbitrage sites I once did. There's still plenty of suspect traffic, but now it's from many sites that send one click a day, rather than 10 each.
I'm surprised that Search Engine Land would post a headline "More Than Half Of Yahoo's Paid Search Clicks Come From Partners". That's like a "Dog Bites Man" headline.
The Thomas Register is good (as a place to search) especially for manufacturers, which was always their core business. I used to use Business.com a few years ago, but more recently their results seem irrelevant. I say this from a searching perspective. Don't know if they generate traffic for marketers.
I will have to check some of the other sites in Galen's article.
Several times I've seen copies of my client's sites, repackaged with AdSense, for sale on eBay. Unfortunately, eBay would not let me comment and warn potential buyers, so I had to go to Google and complain to AdSense. Which meant the person who bought the site got their hand slapped by Google, and found themselves with a worthless website within a week or two of purchase. It's a shame, but unavoidable.
This is very good news.
Especially that YSM will stop accepting arbitraged traffic.
On Wednesday I didn't notice his socks, but he did mention paid links, and used a hypothetical example of a link for mesothelioma on the Washington Post website. So I sat down on the sofa (a makeshift living room where he was podcasting.) Then he asked everyone what they used for searching blogs, and the first guy said Icerocket, and then I said Google Blog Search, which Danny said he also used, and then later some other guy said he used Icerocket (is it really that popular?). So that was my brush with fame this week.
Ahhhhh! This form of spam drives me crazy and the search engines apparently have little or no defence against it. Google isn't so bad as Yahoo and Live.
Story: Should Copyright Laws be Changed or Removed? - High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum
Nobody who is a serious person wants to scrap copyright. Maybe some AdSense publishers do, but nobody who is worth a shred of respect seriously thinks we should end copyright.
Yes, I agree workd should EVENTUALLY go into the public domain, but in the short run creators must be able to control their creations.
Awesome. I wish there would be more public humiliation of people who try to game the system. I continue to be disappointed by people at Sphinn and other industry discussion sites who defend paid links.
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Story: John Andrews Is Going to Work for Google