Saturday, May 26, 2007
AdSense Disabling Arbitrage Accounts - A Story
According to webmasterworld.com Google is discontinuing Arbitrage accounts with effective from June 1st 07. This is a big step towards cleaning Internet Advertising market space, that has been riddled with MFA (Short for Made For Adsense) networks that evolved over the past several years since the inception of Adsense. The problems associated with MFA sites are given below:
1. Little or no value addition: The content of the websites are made primarily to derive money from Adsense (often using Adwords for getting visitors),. These sites offer very little value addition to the visitor, except for providing links to a few advertisers through Adsense.
2. Added burden on CPC to genuine advertisers: The MFA sites bid through Adwords just for getting clicks through Adsense (higher paying clicks). The mechanism of getting visitors through low CPC, and turning them in to paying customers (making net profit) through higher CPC ads is best known only to these MFA networks. All this add to the cost of genuine providers of goods and services.
3. Credibility Issue: Website visitors expect genuine advertisers through Adsense or Adwords. Imagine, only 2 out of 10 are genuine Adsense advertisers that offer value addition for the goods or services offered. Eventually, visitors ignore Ads completely.
4. Loss to genuine Adsense publishers: Those, who are genuine, but do not study closely how Adsense operates, and adjust the ads (like blocking MFA site ads showing up in their own site, etc.) accordingly are likely to loose.
Ofcourse, Google being the biggest player in the field, needs to take the lead in cleaning up the Internet advertising sphere, and tightening Arbitration accounts is a right step in the direction.
1. Little or no value addition: The content of the websites are made primarily to derive money from Adsense (often using Adwords for getting visitors),. These sites offer very little value addition to the visitor, except for providing links to a few advertisers through Adsense.
2. Added burden on CPC to genuine advertisers: The MFA sites bid through Adwords just for getting clicks through Adsense (higher paying clicks). The mechanism of getting visitors through low CPC, and turning them in to paying customers (making net profit) through higher CPC ads is best known only to these MFA networks. All this add to the cost of genuine providers of goods and services.
3. Credibility Issue: Website visitors expect genuine advertisers through Adsense or Adwords. Imagine, only 2 out of 10 are genuine Adsense advertisers that offer value addition for the goods or services offered. Eventually, visitors ignore Ads completely.
4. Loss to genuine Adsense publishers: Those, who are genuine, but do not study closely how Adsense operates, and adjust the ads (like blocking MFA site ads showing up in their own site, etc.) accordingly are likely to loose.
Ofcourse, Google being the biggest player in the field, needs to take the lead in cleaning up the Internet advertising sphere, and tightening Arbitration accounts is a right step in the direction.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Microsoft Trying to Kill Open Source
According to recent news reports, Microsoft is in the process of declaring war on Open Source. Over a period of several years, the software giant has acquired several small, and big companies that produced Open Source code, and discontinued further development or the licensing rights.
M$ says that Open Source has violated hundreds of it patents. Open Source supporters are crying foul, that M$ is trying to seek legal loopholes to wipe out Open Source from being made available for free. It is going to be a very long war, and Open Source supporters are going to fight the patent war with all the resources at their disposal (though meagre compared with M$).
Links: Open Source Software
M$ says that Open Source has violated hundreds of it patents. Open Source supporters are crying foul, that M$ is trying to seek legal loopholes to wipe out Open Source from being made available for free. It is going to be a very long war, and Open Source supporters are going to fight the patent war with all the resources at their disposal (though meagre compared with M$).
Links: Open Source Software
