I recently read a Christian Science Monitor article called "Google's Hidden Payroll" which looks at the economic incentive for tech-savvy third world entrepreneurs to get into publishing extensive web content and enter the Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) game. What should be obvious is that clicks on Adsense ads will be worth far more to site publishers in low-wage countries than they are to someone in high rent, high wage cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Manhattan or Chicago. http://snipurl.com/Made_for_adsense (CS Monitor Article) That article made it appear that the entire Adsense program was a huge underground economy, when in fact that program made it truly viable for legitimate publishers of niche content to do very well for themselves for the first time. Those legitimate publishers had previously earned money through participation in affiliate programs selling products and services related to their site topics - but found that Adsense brought in far more consistent income than affiliate programs. Major, high traffic sites like About.com and even metropolitan newspapers have adopted Adsense as a viable advertising vehicle on content sites. Many enthusiastic hobbyists and other content rich sites learned that their expertise filled sites could earn substantial income and give them incentive to continue writing about their passion. Things went south only when opportunists saw their chance to sell get-rich-quick-on-Adsense ebooks and software to the unitiated. The bad news is that Google Adsense and YPN programs incent those who know how to post web content, to put up massive numbers of web pages, with maximum numbers of "ad units" per page in hundreds of thousands of web pages in the hope that visitors will find those pages and click on those Adsense or YPN ad units and earn the site publisher money for each click. The Adsense and YPN teams must somehow beef up their site review teams to filter out the abusers. Below is a WebmasterWorld discussion forum on the topic: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/13071.htm The ad clicks earn the same money no matter what country hosts the pages they appear on. Computer literate and tech savvy programmers in Delhi or even Jalamabad for that matter, who can afford to buy a $7.95 domain name, host it at $9.95 monthly and get internet access for another $9.95 monthly can be in the made for Adsense content business for as little as $30 monthly. If talented programmers in India have even a basic understanding of search engine ranking and can dynamically insert a bit of javascript provided by Google to thousands of pages of content, they can earn substantial additional income by third world standards. Even one third of what a US publisher might find attractive extra income becomes very attractive to an overworked and underpaid tech worker in many parts of the world. Because the clicks on those ads earn the same money for the New York publisher as for the New Delhi publisher, the potential income to the New Delhi webmaster is worth far more in time spent to get well ranked content pages full of Adsense ads seen. They also have higher incentive for fraud - having others click on ads which appear on their sites or having friends and relatives in different locations do the same - potentially doubling or trebling income for a programmer in India. Again from the CS Monitor story: "Google is actively looking for those kinds of sites," and removes ads from them, explains Eric Gigure, author of "Make Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program." Google created this scene by offering substantial incentive to post web content, often repeated web content and even garbage web content in order to display contextual ads. A new term has even been coined for web sites put up solely to display contextual ads - Made for Adsense or MFA sites. It has been discussed in some forums that Yahoo Publisher Network is filtering ads from appearing on sites outside the US. There are now software programs available to create article sites (I won't link to them here and contribute to their popularity), which encourages webmasters to establish article submission and archiving sites. There are dozens of software packages available that make it easy to set up domains full of templated article pages that come with a database file full of tens of thousands of articles for about $100. The reason? Posting thousands of pages of articles in the hopes of attracting visitors who will click on Adsense or YPN ads. The easy money leeches are lured out of their slime to suck the blood of passersby when something as useful as Adsense comes along. Forget that it now takes almost a year for a new content domain to rank well - even if that webmaster creates a niche site full of truly worthwhile and useful content. Forget that most existing recognized article sites display terms of use that restrict use of articles per domain to under 50 per year. Forget that these templated domains are using thousands of articles against author copyright and article archive terms of use. Gullible and lazy webmasters buy templated and IDENTICAL site creation packages. They are lured by visions of riches, only to be disappointed with no traffic to their Made For Adsense sites full of content already posted widely across the web. Usually, the well established article archives, like EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com will post articles first and will rank best for that content because those sites are already highly ranked and well known as article archives. In a wildly convoluted spin of logic, a new Adsense blacklist site has been launched which purports to help Adsense site owners filter out advertising from other Made for Adsense sites from their own Adsense sites, thus somehow increasing their own income. That is difficult to comprehend, but some Adsense publishers claim it helps increase the click value of ads if they block Adwords ads from competing Made for Adsense sites from appearing on their own sites. Judging by all the online ebooks about getting rich with Adsense, all the templated and prepackaged sites being sold to webmasters to put up domains full of identical content with Adsense, and all the buzz in the forums about made for Adsense content sites - you'd think that Google would be busy looking for ways to limit the inevitable content pollution. The made for Adsense sites are easy to spot, they usually sport logos or hypertext links back to the software site in the form of "Powered by Article Monster" or "Plug-in-Riches" kind of links (these are not real names). Hopefully Google and YPN will begin filtering those and any other membership or "Private Label Rights" content abusive sites to keep web content pollution levels lower in Google search engine results pages. |
