Types Of Publishers And Their eCPM Ranking

Based on my few months of online advertising as a publisher, here is what I think. Currently there are a types of publishers.

1. Search Engines
2. News websites
3. Websites with good content that typically doesn’t become obsolete (more like reference guides for a particular topic)
4. Websites with good content that keeps updating periodically (blogs, that cover the current affairs of a specific topic where there is always some new things happening)
5. Websites with a lot of visitors who come there for everything but the content (some online tools to do some stuff, social networking websites)

I think, the epm reduces from top to bottom in the above list. But don’t expect it to be a linear decline. It would be much much lesser as you go down the list.

If I am missing any other types of publishers, please comment on it along with where in the above order they can be placed.

NOFOLLOW GOOGLE!

Google has been “enhancing” it’s PageRank algorithms every few months are so and constantly affecting the pagerank of various websites. It is dictacting the terms of advertising on other websites by penalizing sites that sell links. The reason for penalizing is two fold

* People displaying irrelevant links on their websites
* Passing on pagerank juice to other websites

First reason, IHMO, is really stupid. I still remember, the days, when whatever stupid word I put in, I end up with atleast one ad, mostly pointing to eBay. So, it’s ok for Google to display most irrelevant and also irritatingly repeated ad that’s keyword templatized, but it’s not ok for webmasters to make money by displaying some what irrelevant ads? The reality is, relevancy is not a boolean variable.

As to the second problem, it’s a problem of Google, however much they try to convince webmasters that it is the websites’ problem.

Say there is plenty of electricity and cheap. Then no one cares about how much they are using. But as the electricity becomes scarce, then it’s going to become expensive and people start caring about their usage. Now, those who install solar panels and are able to produce a little more electricity than what they need, can put the surplus into the grid and can even get paid! Now, if the electricity becomes more and more expensive, then more people would try to install the solar panels and produce power and make money.

Linking is no different. When there was no PageRank, people never cared about how and what they linked from their web pages. But then, suddenly “being linked” became expensive and everyone wants to make money out of it. So, say a website got a PageRank of 6 and doesn’t care to be more than 5, then obviously it can try to sell the extra juice for a fee. This is no different from the above analogy of consumers putting the extra solar electricity into the grid for a fee. How would you feel if the utility companies try to lobby for not paying for your surplus electricity and mandate you to give it back into their grid for free because their livelihood depends on being able to sell electricity? The right technical solution is for these utility companies to invest more on their technologies to make them more efficient and competitive. Not whine and try to pass rules and regulations.

Google has a bigger problem. As time passes, atleast the most popular websites are going to only get more and more inbound links. That brings their pagerank to a perfect 10. That means, they are going to show up more and more on top of the search results. That means, their incentive to pay for Adwords ads decreases (I have seen some stupid companies which rank No 1 in the search results for a given keyword also advertising on the topmost position and I have no clue why they do that!). When that happens, it’s going to eat into Google’s profit.

I remember seeing a while back a few websites having moved from a PageRank of 9 to 10, but later on they moved back to 9. Google seems to be the only site at present having a pagerank of 10. Since PageRank is relative, as long as Google keeps maintaining the highest number of high PR inbound links, it can normalize and reduce the pagerank of all other websites to less than 10.

So, if you believe Google has become that 800lb Gorilla and the Monopoly of this decade/century, how can you prevent Google from dictating your website design, your advertising strategy and your business strategy?

The answer lies in Google’s rule of NOFOLLOW. If everyone on the web goes back and converts their Google reference links with a rel=’nofollow’ attribute, what happens to Google’s pagerank? You get the picture! As of this writing, searching for link:google.com gives a total of about 4,870,000 results. Let’s monitor how this increases/decreases over time.

Cheap Web Traffic, Real But Useless

In my earlier article Cheap Web Traffic & Automated Bogus Bot Clicks I talked about how one could get cheated paying for cheap traffic.

I want to talk about another flavor of cheap traffic, while real is completely useless. As we know, AdBrite uses auction mode and pays as little as $0.001 for some of their full page ads on some of the websites. As a publisher one could display anything they want on their page (even otherwise, there is really no way to enforce this). So, what if a publisher gets such cheap traffic between $0.001 to $0.002 for each full page ad, and within their full page, embeds an iframe linking to your website and charging you more than $0.002 (one person told me he paid $0.003 a visitor)? The interesting thing is, instead of displaying just one such iframe, if they display multiple of those, then their cost is even lesser. However, is such traffic really going to be useful to you? I doubt. You are probably better of using better alternatives at slightly higher price.

I have actually seen a few full page ads of AdBrite where the pages were completely filled with several ad banners. So, those guys must be getting a better CPM on those banners. That too, for every 100 Full Page Ads they pay, say $0.005 per each impression, their CPM cost is only $0.5. However, if they charge a CPM of $1.00 to their customers and display 4 such banners, they are making $4.00 by spending only $0.5.

Cheap Web Traffic & Automated Bogus Bot Clicks

There are offers out there which promise to get traffic dirt cheap. As little as $0.003. Well, even legitimate companies like AdBrite are paying as little as $0.001 for some of their Full Page Ads, but that’s a different issue. I am talking about other companies which promise to bring you traffic while they themselves are not really big.

As it turns out, majority of the visitors sent by these bogus companies are actually automated bot clicks. In addition to using their own automated programs to generate the clicks potentially using multiple IP addresses, some of these companies also actively look for web applications that take a url as an input and provide some type of service such as checking the keyword density, creating tag cloud and other info. Once they identify such applications, they automate submitting the URLs to these web applications so that those applications could simulate the clicks!

Some of these are very bad practices. Instead of cheating people, these guys should try to use their knowledge and effort more constructively. Well, no wonder there are all these viruses. But atleast, in case of the viruses, the original writer is not directly and legally selling any service to the end users. But these companies offering dirt cheap web traffic are doing that!

What’s The Big Deal With Accepting Into Affiliate Programs?

I got rejected today by Overstock affiliate program available through linkshare.com. Common, what’s really the big deal with these companies rejecting websites to participate in their affiliate programs? It’s not like these are cost-per-click programs. So, how does it matter whether Overstock’s ad is on one of my crappy web page?

The truth is, I found that Overstock provides its data feeds without much of a fuss unlike Amazon which carefully selects whom to give its data feeds. So, after downloading the data feed from Overstock and experimenting a bit, I realized that I could invest some time and effort to build a good website around their data feed. However, it’s a chicken and egg problem. Unless I am accepted into their program, why would I spend my precious time in creating a solution based on their data? So, I just used one of my other websites that is not really related to retailing just to get accepted into the program and then work on the idea. However, Overstock rejected me.

BTW, Overstock is not the only company. There are a few other companies too that carefully select their affiliates. I am currently an Amazon affiliate who got accepted without much hassle and I have earned as much as $300.00 a month from Amazon. Now, who is the loser? Overstock or me? If it doesn’t want to accept me, so be it. I will just spend more time promoting Amazon’s products!

Here is my serious advise to all those marketing managers sitting in the ivory towers. If you are thinking that part of your job is to police on the affiliate signers, you are probably missing out to the bigger guys like Amazon. Why do you think Amazon has more than a million affiliates while most others are lucky to have a few thousand?

Again, I repeat, with CPA (Cost Per Action) model, you guys have got nothing to lose whether your ad is on a well designed website or otherwise.

Context For Non-Contextual Ads

Some ad networks display ads that are not contextual and so can claim that their ads can co-exist with Google’s AdSense. So, while these ad networks don’t crawl your web page to figure out the context, they can still obtain context. Wondering how?

You typically place an ad networks javascript code in your page. That javascript code has access to document.referrer field which gives the referrer from where your web page is being visited. Sometimes this field is blank and that happens when the visitor directly visits your web page, perhaps by book marking and sometimes people who value higher privacy simply block it in their browser such that the referrer field is not carried forward. But when this field is available, then you get all interesting information from it. You know which site is referring to the current page. But most importantly, if your page is discovered through search, the referrer field contains the most important piece of contextual information, the keyword which helped in the visitor coming to your website! So, the non-contextual ad javascript can pass this information to the ad server and that server can keep track of all the various keywords that helped in discovering your page. Then over a period of time, the ad network can start displaying ads related to those keywords! Technically, doing this in a way makes the ads contextual since the keywords identified from the referrer are essentially those that are most likely to be on the page.

So, next time if you are surprised how a non-contextual ad network that never crawled your web pages is able to display some of the most relavant ads, this is how it is possible!

AdSense Browse – Stupidity Or Desperation?

Recently I started observing browse controls on Google AdSense. Below is an example

Notice how in the bottom left corner, there are two left and right arrows? The idea is that you can use those arrows to browse the ads. Clicking the right arrow displays more ads without refreshing the page.

Now call me cynic, but who is interested in browsing ads? We all know that ads are a necessary evil that we don’t like, but content/service can’t be free and the publishers/search engines have to make money. But how many of us go to the extent of browsing ads? At a time more and more people are trying to use blockers for all kinds of advertising, this “enhancement” from Google seems to be interesting.

Based on their latest quarterly results which plummeted the stock quite a bit, perhaps Google is getting a bit desperate to maintain the pace of growth. My suggestion to Google would be bring more transparency in how you qualify websites for AdSense, how you identified click fraud and disqualified a website (there are many on the web who are victims of this and I can only say that some of the websites probably are not there to fraud) and that helps both the publisher, the advertiser and also Google.