Google Inside

The following article is an anti-AdSense publication produced by Google Inside.

As of November 15th, Google changed their AdSense “Click Area” policies.

Continuing these improvements, we’ve just changed our text ads slightly to help reduce accidental clicks. In the past, users could click on both the background and full text of an ad, but now they can click only on the title and URL of a text ad. By allowing users to click only on the ad title and URL, we aim to decrease accidental clicks, better aligning visitor behavior with their intent. Overall, the decrease in accidental clicks will keep users on your website, interacting with your content, until they intend to click on an ad.

So let’s take a look at one example of a publisher’s revenue (my data for one of my assets).

The blurred area is to be in compliance with the AdSense TOS.

I’ve been generating a stable $30-$40 per day for the past 3 or 4 months. After this change took place, to “decrease accidental clicks,” revenue dropped drastically.

The report I’m showing you is on a very small scale. Consider a site generating $100 per day, $1000 per day, maybe $10,000 per day. If my revenue dropped nearly 50%, consider going from a $5,000 day down to $2,000 or $3,000. That’s a pretty huge drop in revenue.

Are the advertisers happier now? I doubt it. If advertisers had been mad about “accidental clicks,” they would have just stopped using the system and moved to a CPA model.

But let’s take this one step further. What about Google’s overall revenue stream? Google is dependent so heavily on AdSense and AdWords that it would be a mistake for it to want to cut out revenue long-term.

The GOOG stock has taken a pretty serious hit lately. Dropped over $100 in the matter of a month.

We’ve covered the stories of breaking $700, then dropping below again, it honestly just seems like their stock is so unstable that it’s going to just bust one of these days.

To be honest, Google is planning their own death by continuing with this. In the long run, they are going to damage their publisher base and lose a lot of publishers due to the decrease in revenue.

Here are some other resources on the subject,

• Barry at SERoundTable
• Google AdSense: When A Click No Longer Counts As A Click
• Report: Click Fraud Reaches 15.8% In Q2 2007
• Less Than 5% Click Fraud Makes You “Virtually Free”
• Click Fraud On The Rise, Says Click Forensics