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USA Today published an article yesterday named Google search ads find momentum which discusses Google's AdSense program. Two well-known forum personalities were quoted in the article.
John Scott of V7N Forums:
"AdSense, in my opinion, is the worst thing to happen to the Internet," says John Scott, who runs the V7n.com online forum for search marketers. "Google is ... in essence, paying people to inundate the Web with literally billions of worthless pages."
Jennifer Slegg (Jenstar, JenSense.com) of Search Engine Watch and DigitalPoint Forums:
Whatever its editorial worth, the AdSense business model clearly works for what blogger Jennifer Slegg describes as "hundreds of thousands" of website and blog publishers.Slegg, who runs the JenSense AdSense tips blog, says the monthly AdSense bounty ranges from $100 to tens of thousands of dollars.
"The average is more like a few thousand a month," she says. "The ones who do really, really well, however, really work for it. It's not a windfall; they put in the hours."
Cool beans!
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
Comments:
Sébastien Billard
08/16/2006 12:03 pm
Adsense it not the "worst thing to happen to the Internet" IMHO, though, it has distorted the web : before, advertising was a way to monetize content. Now content is a way to display advertising.
Barry Schwartz
08/16/2006 12:08 pm
Take it up with John Scott, his forum is at http://www.v7n.com/forums/
Dan Thies
08/16/2006 01:51 pm
They're both right... AdSense is one of the best things to happen to the web - it made it profitable to create real valuable content again. AdSense is one of the worst things to happen to the web, as John has pointed out, and it's not a big stretch to call it the worst thing. As long as contextual ad networks don't discriminate between real content and stolen content, between actual value and machine-generated gibberish, it's a real mixed blessing. The Adsense spammers I've spoken with tell me that the rewards for intercepting search queries are a lot higher than the rewards for adding real value. Why? Because click-through rates are higher when you capture a searcher.
Dave
09/10/2006 08:45 pm
Adsense was once a good thing, it allowed start- ups to generate a supportive cash-flow. But now it's just a Free-For-All of mostly junk pages. And Google is the only winner.