Google Adsense disabling arbitrage accounts
Google is not only getting rid of adult domain names in their domain parking program, they are now also trying to clean up the arbitrage play. Arbitrage means driving traffic to your sites from cheaper keywords (sometimes on other ad-networks) and then converting them to higher paying keywords on your own site, in order to pocket the difference. This strategy is often employed on so-called “Made for Adsense” sites.
Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts… and since it seems that arbitrage publishers are the ones receiving this account disabled email, to give those publisher enough time to shut down accounts or use an alternative source for their outgoing traffic.
Right now, I have only heard from those doing either “Made for AdSense” style of sites or those doing arbitrage, and it does include publishers making significant money per month ($10,000 USD and higher). So they are not giving a pass to those who are earning above a certain threshold. And it seems that no one who is outside of the arbitrage/MFA area of AdSense earnings has been affected thus far.
And good news is that Google will be paying out earnings to those publishers, so they do not need to worry that they will lose any income earned thus far.
At this point I don’t know if this is affecting Adsense for Domains (the parking feed for many domain traffic aggregators) as well, however it would coincide nicely with the shut down of some newer parking companies that might have had some problems keeping “junk” traffic out of their networks.
[via JenSense]
I *so* wish I could buy stock in AdBrite right now. The arb stuff may not be ideal from Google’s perspective but they’re opening the door wider and wider for competitors — Someone is going to fill that gap.
Tom, the problem is that the market gap has to be filled by buyers, not sellers. Many are questioning the quality of arbitraged traffic. e.g. if I am bidding for “luxury purple raincoats” and getting lots of traffic from people who searched “cheap raincoats” the conversions ratios won’t hold up.
There are plenty of Adsense alternatives, but the average EPCs are very, very poor. In some cases, under a penny per click. The whole reason PPC to PPC arbitrage works is because of the high paying content bids.
Arbitragers could probably still use Yahoo Publisher Network. I also wouldn’t be suprised if some of these guys go more “black hat”, splitting operations across many different accounts to hide their volume. As for Adbrite filling the Google gap, I don’t expect it.
Reported on Frank Michlick’s blog, ‘DomainEditorial.com’. Frank references the JenSense blog. Looks like Google is trying to scrub the most bush-league implementations that don’t deliver any additional value to visitors. Still.. as competition and quality rises, today’s high-brow becomes tomorrow’s bush-league. Better to get your hands on a high quality generic domain so you have a fail-over.
I am writing a story about Google making millions off of innocent publishers and would like feed back from everyone.If you would like to share your story please contact me .I am only interested in valid sites not Google content sites.
contact me at flipmybic@gmail.com or at http://www.petpeev.com
I am not interested in getting my account back i only had 38.00 and I signed up as an experiment to see if these stories had any truth to them. Turns out google only wants the big dogs and the google content type sites (why you might ask ) $ that’s why those sites make them tons of $