» Adsense Arbitrage Google to kill MFA’s

Communiques of impending doom 

According to Jensense Google are going to be disabling adsense accounts that are being used for MFA type 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

That’s big news, especially if you are one of these people who have gotten kind of comfortable earning what seemed to be a relatively easy buck.

Arbitrage in a nutshell

For those of you who don’t know what it is and how it all worked, the short explanation is that you’d build a site designed to get clicks from users on your adsense ads and earn a buck.

How you obtained the traffic varied. Some people used PPC (pay per click) programs to buy clicks at the lowest possible rate and filtered them through to a site with ads that attracted a higher payback. So if you paid $.05 for a click and got $.06 upwards back then you’d make a profit.

Google being the largest PPC player on the block means that exclusion from their program leaves a smaller pie to play with.

So what who cares, did anyone die?

Is there anything inherently wrong with this practice? Well, Google seem to think so, else why would they take this action. yet, it has to be said that people do similar things in different ways and different markets. Its called Capitalism.

It remains to be seen whether similar programs will take similar actions. They all make vsrious public pronouncements about how they like to protect their advertisers and add value to them and all that old hype, yet the reality is that in the case of Google for example they’ve happily just let the pennies roll on in for some years now without any real meaningful steps to curtail the process.

One can only speculate as to what actually drove this decision. A call to arms to clean up the SERPs perhaps? A cry from advertisers sick of low quality traffic. A general why should an external marketer be allowed to profit from our system using two sides of the same coin even. Who knows.

The bottom line is that the game has changed yet again.

Dealing with it and taking remedial steps

If you are a thin affiliate for example with product feeds and general low quality ‘find it everywhere else’ kind of content with adsense thrown in for good measure, then perhaps you too could find yourself on the receiving end of one of these unwelcoming letters.

Of course it could just be a public purge designed to bolster waning perceptions of ad quality and policing. Advertiser confidence is key to the success of any program. Advertisers using the adsense network don’t want to have low quality shitty visitors to their sites from people who had no alternative other than to click an advert, the view being that this type o traffic simply doesn’t convert. If advertiser confidence in the adsense network is improved then it follows that more will participate. More participants equals more revenue of course.

I can understand this too. On sites I run, Ive opted out of the adsense network from the off, simply because of all the low quality non converting crap I used to receive.

Don’t get me wrong, the adsense network can be great from a brand building and getting your url out there perspective, and it really does depend too on what kind of market sector you operate in. The big arber sharks of this world tend to target the highest paying keywords as these offer the biggest payback for them, perhaps an additional problem has been that as more people have gotten in on the act, this net has increasingly expanded downwards with arbers being forced into going for the smaller paying terms as the larger ones margins were squeezed.

On days like this, I’m glad I’m not an arber

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