Google Adsense Is Still No. 1

posted by darkknight in March 14th, 2008

Again, another discussion on the effects of Adsense reducing clickable areas for its ads from yugatech. The main premise is that publishers are now “earning less” because of this drastic change, prompting Yuga to say that

With this development, it might scare away huge publishers to move on to more high-return networks. That could further hurt AdSense’s performance and drive down revenues in the coming months.

Here’s my reply and thought on the matter.

I read somewhere that soon, earnings of publishers will catch up to almost the same (or will be even higher) compared to the times before the change because of these:

1) Due to less clicks, advertisers are now spending less than before. This means that they’ll have the money to up the budget by SPENDING MORE on the keywords that they bid.

2) Elimination of accidental Clicks will actually drive more advertisers to Google. Again, keyword competition can go an all time high, thus leading to higher returns for publishers.

And why in the name of Yahoo would you optimize for accidental clicks? The great idea behind Adsense is that ads are targeted, and you use them on your site because it provides relevant/more information your user might want or need. Others might disagree with me (mainly because of the quality of some advertisers), but I firmly believe that advertisements, especially Adsense, are meant to be “wantedly” clicked.

I think the only publishers who are affected are the ones who optimize for accidental clicks. I’ve read the Adsense Policy and TOS a million times and I can say that optimizing for accidental clicks is 99% reason enough to get banned from the network.

In addition, I see this move by Google as a challenge to further improve my earnings through