There’s a lot of noise (oops, that’s say “discussion” and “rants”) in the internet marketing world right now. The recent ebooks “Adsense Is Dead” and “Adsense Is Alive” take the opposite ends of the spectrum in their premise.
What’s behind it all?
Google, home of the number one search engine, first made its money by putting individual text ads on its search results. Like Yahoo before it, Google made some good money that way — and is still making a bundle. Google calls its “pay-per-click” program for advertisers Adwords.
As an extension of that advertising system, and extending the functions of its web search functions, too, Google started a related program called Adsense for web site publishers. Some are making a bundle. Some were making a bundle. Therein lies the rub…
As you might imagine, some people made big bucks by creating web sites with results scraped from search engines, just to get sites with lots of words (and maybe nonsense sentences) so that Google would find them and index them. Of course, the name of the game was to focus those web sites on high-paying keywords — words like “mesothelioma” whose advertisers would pay Google upwards of $50 PER CLICK. When Google shared the income, that meant big dollars.
Of course, that gravy train couldn’t last. The advertisers wanted their dollars to be more effective in generating income for them, not for generated site operators.
Yet, web site publishers with real content are still making money with Adsense.
