Slashdot Mirror
Google Quietly Closes AdSense API to Small Sites
NewsCloud writes "Google has raised the required minimum traffic limit for publishers who wish to use its AdSense API to 100,000 page views per day. The AdSense API was introduced in March as a way for sites with user generated content to share advertising revenue with their members. Says Google, "This policy change will probably result in fewer developers going live and give us a chance to enhance our support resources and processes to more easily support a greater number of developers in the future...we hope to be able to lower it in the future as we become more efficient at supporting our developers!" Meanwhile, some publishers report waiting a month for their API usage to be approved. I take Google at its word for now but worry that small developers could be increasingly squeezed out of the mashup space if this were to become a trend."
Is there any competition to capture this <100K market?
Anyway, site developers can still share profits with contributing users, it's just less transparent and more tedious to work out the portions.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Maintaining a high level of customer service is an admirable goal. Why is this "evil"? Note, this isn't closing _adsense_ but the Adsense API.
"Anyway, site developers can still share profits with contributing users, it's just less transparent and more tedious to work out the portions."
Anyone who can read the server logs and contributors list can figure it all out.
This just shows that the AdSense network is not robust enough to handle the amount of users that wanted to participate. By limiting the program to users that have high volume, they maximize profit. This allows that devision of Google to fund R&D on how to improve the network to include more participants. This just appears to be an issues of cost.
When is Google gonna have a "We're officially evil!" press release? Sorry for the troll, can't help it.
Stories submitted by user NewsCloud:
Spotlight on Facebook Groups Affects Microsoft http://jeff.newscloud.com/2007/09/06/microsoft-digital-advertising-placing-ads-on-facebook-hate-groups/
Facebook Exposes Advertisers To Hate Speech
http://jeff.newscloud.com/2007/09/03/facebook-brand-left-to-mercy-of-hate-groups/
Facebook Apps Facing Delays and Uncertainties
http://www.idealog.us/2007/06/thanks_for_deve.html
idealog = personal spamblog, newscloud = spam blog, whom Google undoubtedly denied AdSense API access
Personally, I'm kind of tired of seeing those ads everywhere I go :)
Maybe it'll cut down some load time for the remaining ones as they save some bandwidth as well.
FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT
fix it. Fix it. fix it. Fix it.
fix it fix it fix it fix it fix it.
It's been about 10 stories behind and it's annoying the SHIT out of us RSS regulars.
100,000 pageviews a day may seem small in comparison to some sites on the web, but that actually limits the number of sites to only a few thousand. I run a site that gets roughly 50,000 pageviews a day, and also ranks in the top 50,000 sites on alexa.com. If pageviews across sites are skewed exponentially towards the busiest sites, that means that roughly 10,000 or less sites are eligible to participate. Interesting.
Be relentless!
Maintaining a high level of customer service is an admirable goal. Why is this "evil"? Note, this isn't closing _adsense_ but the Adsense API.
Google should hire you as their Chief Newspeak Officer.
Every single smaller advertiser I know that has attempted to get some money through advertising for google had their account yanked a few weeks before it reached the point where google actually had to pay something. Every single one. And always without any way to challenge the yanking, as in "we detected click-fraud and YOU have to prove we're wrong, but we won't show you anything that may help you".
Guess who's permanently in my adblock filter?
Why just complain about my Facebook posts? You don't seem to have a problem with: Looking Into Mozilla's Financial Success, Gates Foundation Revokes Pledge to Review Portfolio and Moglen on Social Justice and OSS. It's not like the NewsCloud logo is all stealth on my blog :)
I've never had any problem with ad revenue and payments. Just my experience...
So according to the person who wrote the title, we should believe that a website with 90,000 page views a day is a "small" site. I had a good laugh when I read that.
I hate those stupid autogenerated search sites that do nothing more than come up with ads for your keywords, they get put up all over the place. I hope this kills them.
They wouldn't have qualified. And my id is not that low.
It seems that Google wants the startups to go with someone, or rather, something else - which is not a bad idea until you consider the fact this practice will eventually cut Google out of a large portion of the market. Why would a well-established website, with its own marketing staff, cater to Google? Once you've hired marketing staff (as opposed to just using Google), there's going to be a resistance to change. Sure, you can fire them, but I'm thinking that ~100,000 views/day point, the operation is still on first-name-basis scale, and nobody likes firing their friends.
Everybody starts small.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
How much of AdSense Ads are Scam?
I'm not talking of the kind of scam that you pay but don't receive. Put those products that promise solutions they don't or only partially provide.
Or silly, poorly made products, where most of investment in the product is buying adwords.
Look the ads Google put on your site. Would they be approved by your advertisement editorial team? Do they make your site less credible? Do they lower the value of your ad space?
Google technology so far is much more focused on being popular, not on quality.
That was good when search algorithms where just about "number of words" and other easily burled techniques. But Google grew up only in size, it keeps applying the same "popular principle" to everything.
If it draws people attention it's good.
For adsense, the good websites are those that just attract people, specially the kind of people that are easily manipulated, those likely to believe on something by just "two lines of text", at least to believe enough to click on them and generate revenue.
People which are "smart" enough to manipulate other people into clicking in their ads, and eventually buying their products, are considered good partners by Google, at least until those partners disappear with their bad products and someone else fit their shoes.
This generally low quality reduce the value of advertisement at all, and so reduce content generator's revenue.
Google doesn't care because it can scale those pennies and attract new people to that model (either scammertisements and content generators).
Soon it will affect the websites themselves. If the ads of a website are bad people will consider the whole experience equally bad and won't visit those websites anymore. If they need some info they won't visit a specialized website anymore. Who they will visit? Google.
Who will show the advertisement on the first line of the search results, bypassing that once credible specialized website.
I wonder how many people who do somehow commercial related searches click on the ads before clicking on the actual search results? Google obviously won't say the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if that number is over 50%.
Google, the popular shallow culture to the Internet.
and together I earn from them around $300/month, after expenses. What I've noticed is that if you start doing well, Google Adsense knocks you down to where you can't do well at all. I had a string of months where I was bringing in about $1000/month and then there was an immediate and shocking drop in revenue on May 30 of this year. I put in an extreme amount of effort bringing up the quality of the sites and making sure I offered something decent for the visitors. I was getting many repeat visitors direct to the sites, so obviously what I had was valuable to them. However, Google dropped my search ranking and dropped the amount I was earning per click for no apparent reason. At the same time, a direct competitor in the market suddenly zoomed up and got one of the special multi-link first result entries, at the same time they clearly bought a bunch of AdWords. Don't believe that Google's search results are spam-free. People who spend lots on AdWords gravitate to the top of the search results, without providing better content to the actual visitor. I admit I'm a fan of many things that Google has done for the internet, but clearly their advertising systems are not run with a philosophy of helping the 'little guy with good content'. It's all dedicated to bringing in smaller numbers of large chunks of money rather than larger numbers of small amounts. Even if the final dollar total is the same, they know which is easier to manage within their systems and will accomodate. In reality, Google is helping the internet become what the largest corporations want...pablum for the masses with very few popular websites and no way for lone inventors to rise up. Kinda like radio and TV progressed before the present.
It was reported here that sites have been waiting up to a month or more to be approved, activated or whatever. This would seem to make viable an assumption of limited capacity on their end to serve new signups.
If the number of sites signing up per month is X, while they only have the capacity to include the smaller number Y, then it would make sense to either hire more people or find some way to reduce X to the level of Y. Assuming they are not hiring people, what's the best way of reducing X? Setting a limit on site views seems to be rather optimal - you get only the bigger sites, but also more professional and experienced hosts as counterparts. I don't see their way out as evil.
One of the features of Apple's new iWeb release is AdSense: http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/#google
But, this program is surely targeted toward the average person's boring blog, not something that would generate significant traffic. So, is the feature just broken for them now?
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
Slashdot (and Idealog) has this incredibly wrong:
Publishers and Developers in the AdSense API are different beasts. Developers are people like hosting companies, publishers are the people who run the actual sites. The API was created so that hosts could implement their own version of AdSense which their users (the publishers) could use instead of going direct through the primary AdSense pages. The hosting group (developers) get a cut of the revenue from page views and referrals, the users get the rest.
Essentially, this lets hosts force users to go through them to use AdSense.
While many websites don't pull 100k PVs/day, if you're a host you generally should be able to have 100k PVs/day for all sites under your umbrella. So in reality, this will only affect really, really small hosting resellers who somehow have the resources to implement the API before they even have a decent userbase. This makes sense for Google, as their process for approving Developers to go live (their sandbox will work if you are not live, but Google must approve your implementation before you can use the actual AdSense servers) is not quick or easy. They spend the time to ensure that your implementation is up to snuff and secure.
So this would be news if the publishers had to all have 100k PVs to get AdSense, but it's a non-story since it's the developers/hosts.