Goodbye Adsense, it’s been sweet’n’sour…

I’ve had an Adsense Account for a very long time, but it hasn’t really generated much in the way of additional revenue though the nearly annual check for $100 has been a nice supplement in some ways. Oddly, it had been performing better on InvestorBlogger than in a long time with the addition of the Shylock Plugin. But this week brought an opportunity disguised as a challenge; and a challenge disguised as an opportunity.

First, the opportunity was wrought by none other than the Google machine, which not content with reducing clickable areas on Google Ads, reducing PRs on many blogs, now acted to cut payout terms for referrals for those who were lucky enough to be in a primary country (currently, the US, Canada and Japan). For those of the rest of the world, referrals were cut to zero (and that’s backdated to July of 2007!)

The Eleventh Hour for Adsense

Too many changes for me, and just added an eleventh reason to my list of why Adsense is now bad for bloggers. Shoemoney has already weighed in on the debate, citing it as a slap in the face of foreign webmasters with the words: “They are terminating your referral program completely. That’s right! If you are not in the Americas, or Japan, your done.” The discussion on his blog has already gone to 123 comments.

Problogger who hails from the land downunder is also mightily chagrined, and in an update to his posts points out that the rule is retrospective: “So for “international” publishers – every person that you and I have sent to AdSense since the end of July last year that reaches a conversion point in the coming months will earn us nothing at all.” His discussion has already merited 95 responses at this point.

Goodbye, Adios, Ciao, Adsense…

So, with a heavy heart I cleared out the last of my Adsense on InvestorBlogger. But at the same point, I was boyed by a challenge. An advertiser had been contacting me looking for advertising space on my blog. I had just themed for Christmas, and didn’t see the point when I’d be doing a new theme in the New Year.

New Year: New Opportunities

Persistent, though, and I was finally able to match his requirements with spots for five advertisements or banners on the blog, with two long 728×90 slots and three traditional banners. This was timely as I didn’t want to load my site up with more than a few basic banners. I’ve also installed another plugin that will facilitate additional advertising opportunities. More later…. So, really a silver lining. And I’ll be retaining Adsense on my other websites as its far too difficult to remove them all at this point. But performance isn’t improving.

In the meantime do take a look at the banners on this site, and check out the investing products that are on offer. Since these aren’t Adsense ads, I can encourage clicks to them all. In the meantime, let’s see how Google’s stockprice fares… Mmm.

Hubris Revisited: Google’s Role Model – the Big 4 Music Companies!

I can’t help thinking though that I’m beginning to see a rerun of the problems that are afflicting the CD companies not just a few years ago, but still to this day. Raise prices, offer limited selections, cut your backlists of offerings, screw your artists royally, promote only those bland enough artists that can survive the global markets, and rail against the technology of the day as illegal.

Then worse, start suing your ‘former’ customers, watch your stocks stumble and sales drop by double digit percentages year after year… Could this be what happens to Google? But on Internet time?

Google is already cutting back on the websites payouts via Adsense, cropping rankings, dropping referrals, soon they will be deleting listings from their catalogue… all the time trying to promote the 20% of websites that make up the 80% of their traffic.

But what mostly they forget is that those 20% of websites are only part of a web-o-sphere that is vast. And many websites get truckloads of traffic from sites that aren’t even ranked properly … all those ones and twos begin to add up.

So, Google, I guess you won’t listen to me, but my readers will, and they will form their own opinions, regardless of what you do. Let’s hear it here!

(ed. added graphic and some additional comments.)