Hey Google, smartprice THIS!

Posted by stuart as , , , , , , ,

As any adsense publisher who’s watched his CPC drop consistently over the last couple of months, and consequently earnings stay stable despite increasing impressions and CTR, I have one thing to say:

“Smartprice THIS!!”

As someone who also uses Google’s Adwords advertising program, but not a user of conversion tracking, I’m a bit confused as to how smartpricing can possibly be good for anyone other than dodgy advertisers.

If I understand correctly, Adwords advertisers tell google: “Hey goog’, this adsense site is giving me crap conversions, I only want to pay $0.10 a click, even though the going rate is a buck”

Google says: “No worries mate, sounds good to us - we’ll take $0.05, and give the sucker Adsense publisher $0.05″

Surely this will cause the ass to drop out of the contextual advertising market eventually? I’m not going to keep trying to produce quality content if advertisers get to tell Google how good their conversions are.

Bring on the international launch of YPN and MSN’s contextual ad program - it will be interesting to see what happens to smartpricing when there’s some competition in the market.

Google can’t continue to court Adwords advertisers whilst screwing down the payouts to Adsense publishers when there’s competition for both advertisers and publishers. They won’t have many advertisers banging down the doors if all the content providers are switching platforms.