I just checked my AdSense revenue for today and noticed a click that paid me a stunning total of three bloody cents.
I mean, I appreciate the long tail of just about anything as much as anyone, but boy-oh-boy! That has got to be the skinny prehensile appendage of pay-per-click text advertising.
Which got me thinking: AdWords is currently set up so that advertisers can decide what they are willing to pay. Then Google automagics the numbers so that they pay only a penny more than then next most profligate advertiser.
All well and good.
But what if Google set up AdSense so that publishers (that’s me and you) can decide at what price they are willing to sell? Then Google would automagically set up advertisers and publishers with matching parameters – kind of like an electronic ad dating service.
(AdWords and AdSense are two sides of the same coin: AdWords is the advertiser side, where ads are purchased; AdSense is the publisher side, where ads are displayed.)
I’d like to be able to set minimums for my ad space. Why won’t Google let me do that?
[tags] google, adsense, adwords, publisher, advertiser, pay-per-click, john koetsier [/tags]
That’s why I jacked them in. Three cents is an insult to your hard work and creativity, John.
Google will never allow publishers to set the minimum price for the ads, because there are tons of advertisers that really won’t pay more than a few cents per click.
You know that AdWords was born intending to monetize only Google own pages, but later they created the AdSense program, allowing any publisher to make money from content. Of course, the best paying advertisers are reserved for GMail, Google Search and other Google related services. If publishers decide to massively set, e.g., 50 cents as minimum price, what would Google do with that legion of two cents paying advertisers?
Remember, there is no free luch, buddy.
Por que o AdSense não permite que definamos o preço dos cliques…
No artigo Why won’t Google let bloggers control AdSense price minimums? o autor reclama que ao analisar o relatório de rendimentos de um determinado dia percebeu que alguém clicara num anúncio, e este rendera apenas três centavos de dólar, o que…
Janio:
I agree with what you’re saying, but here’s the deal: without buyers and sellers actually cooperating to set pricing through some natural kind of supply and demand, you don’t really have a market.
To me, that’s problematic.
(Of course, it could just be – probably is – the case that there is so much supply that sellers/publishers have no pull)