The End of Arbitrage on Google Adsense?

Today's rant is as a result of a recent post by Ms Jennifer Slag of Jensense.com, a blog that discusses contextual advertising like adsense. Contextual advertising is the automatic delivery of ads that are relevant to content of a webpage. For example, a page about a particular recipe will show adverts related to the subject matter on the page like advertisements of recipe books, kitchen appliances e.t.c

Google's adsense is the largest contextual advertising network in the world, bringing millions of publishers and advertisers together. According to jensense.com, some adsense publishers have been receiving mails from Google warning them that their business model was inappropriate for Adsense. And as such their accounts were getting closed as at the beginning of this month. Google is being very civil about things as all the closed accounts will still receive the monies earned so far.

The websites affected are referred to as Made for Adsense (MFA's) websites. MFAs are designed with express purpose that a visitor will reach it and exit through an advertisement. The publisher makes money every time a visitor clicks on the adverts to exit the site.

Adsense, being a great online money maker is driving search engine (SE) spamming. MFAs have long depended on such tactics. But with SEs getting smatter they turned to 'Adsense arbitrage'.

This involves MFA owners who are both adsense publishers and advertisers. They buy adverts cheaply and drive traffic to their MFA websites, which are designed to show more expensive ads and hence make a profit. Evidently, with the measures Google is taking, this game is over. But what is amazing is the extent people are prepared go to in breaking sound business principles to make a buck. The aspect of making a profit is becoming an overriding factor. Business models like Adsense arbitrage are driven by nearly an animalistic drive for profit.

In business, profit is nearly always guaranteed with the creation and delivery of value. Business models like Adsense arbitrage and others like them do not create value to surfers searching for information online. In fact, the high click through rate (CTR) observed in such website is often because the visitor lands on a page that has such thin value that they want to leave.

It is already known that clicks from such visitors rarely turn into conversions. This in turn results to fewer and fewer advertisers opting to have their adverts placed in websites. In turn this will eventually reduce the quality of free information that maybe available as publishers offer free quality content when what they make from advertising makes it their worth. Adsense arbitrage is a poor business model and to tell you the truth, good riddance.