Google Lost Your Revenue
Posted by jonathan at 7:29pm EST on 01/27/2009
Here’s where you a Google engineer hits his forehead on the table and thinks, “stupid, stupid, stupid.”
If you have a Blogger site, some of you may have noticed that your ad units began showing public service announcements (PSAs) in the last nine hours. This was due to a technical issue that we’ve now identified and resolved. As a result, you should now begin seeing paid ads on your pages again.
Ouch.
You may or may not have seen an ad like this (seen on the right), you would probably recognize it as a public service advertisement, which is what it is. These ads do not generate any revenue for the publisher because they it is one of Google’s ways to offer public service. These ads are typically seen on websites that have not yet been crawled for content, so AdSense doesn’t yet know what kind of ads to serve.
You also might see these ads on a site where the content that has been crawled, but the content is in violation of the AdSense Terms of Service. This is common.
A small bug that hit the AdSense platform for Blogger blogs was that all ads being served were PSAs, instead of normal ads — even if you were not in violation and had already been crawled.
Ouch, again.
Overall, nine hours isn’t that long, but when you look at how many blogs are hosted on Blogger, that’s a solid amount of revenue — for both Google and its publishers.
This is an example of why I host my own blog. Of course, the bug could have happened and for example, stopped serving ads for all blogs using WordPress, but I host my own blog for many other reasons.
This blog is proudly hosted by LiquidWeb and powered by WordPress.
