Since I have no insight into ads or Google’s financial numbers, I can post this. I post this on my own, and have no idea what my employer thinks…
Last month, Markus Frind reported on his blog that his adsense click-through-rate “declined by 60% in the last 2 months”. Content providers that make lots of money through pretty liberal placement of fairly useless advertising have been complaining. It’s no surprise that they are disappointed; who wouldn’t be.
This week, Google’s 10K report says:
“…the main focus of our advertising programs is to provide relevant and useful advertising to our users, reflecting our commitment to constantly improve their overall web experience. As a result, we may continue to take steps to improve the relevance of the ads displayed on our web sites and our Google Network members’ web sites. These steps include removing ads that generate low click-through rates or that send users to irrelevant or otherwise low quality sites and terminating Google Network members whose web sites do not meet our quality requirements. In addition, we may continue to take steps to reduce the number of accidental clicks. These steps could negatively affect our near-term advertising revenues…”
Advertisers seem to be heralding the news (see comments), as you would expect.
Ah it is more then normal to complain and even easier to bash those that complain. But have you ever asked your self why the premium Google adsense members haven’t been affected by the click zone and they still have the old full space clikable? Wouldn’t be easier to “improve” and test the server at the premium publishers that have a much bigger audience and where the stats would give better numbers?
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