Tag Archives: adsense

Google’s Amoral Greatness?

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Update:  A Googley View of the matter:   Google speaketh o Copyrights

Often the weekend brings the best internet philosophy discussions and one is brewing today about whether Google is the good or bad guy in the content equation.    The answer in my opinion is that it is pretty nuanced and best seen as a series of  inevitabilities rather than points about fairness or best practices or who is doing what for whom.

Over at the Guardian the argument is that Google’s gotten out of hand and is running roughshod over anybody who stands in their profitable path:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy

…. one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old. This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience. There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny. And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier …

Meanwhile Mike Arrington disagrees – more accurately lashes out at the Google detractors,  suggesting:

Let’s all be clear here. What Porter and Bragg want is a subsidy from Google. A sort of welfare tax on a profitable company so that they can continue to draw the paychecks they’ve become accustomed to. That isn’t going to happen, and all this hand wringing isn’t helping to move their respective industries toward a successful business model. They either need to adapt or die. And they’re choosing a very noisy and annoying death.

Some truth to this but also pretty harsh given how disruptive Google’s been to the whole show.    Mike overlooks that the *single most disruptive act* in internet history was Google’s launch of Adsense, which monetizes content for all websites and more than any other single factor has led to an explosion of the spam, mediocre content, and some excellent content that has accelerated (though I think has not caused) the demise of legacy content providers like newspapers.

I said over at TechCrunch that:

Mike I’m not sure I agree with the analysis but here you’ve pulled together the “Google Goodness” argument about as cleverly and succinctly as it can be done.

I think a bigger perspective on this is far more nuanced.   The rise of Google search aggregation has in most cases diminished the average profitability of premium content.   It has slightly (but only ever so slightly) *raised* the tiny profitability of non-premium content such as the ocean of mediocre blog posts, stupid pet trick websites, and made for adsense efforts.    Something is gained as we move to a very democratic global publishing paradigm but also something significant is lost in this equation.   David Brooks of the NYT writes some brilliant stuff we need to hear in these challenged times.   He refuses to use Twitter.   Like hundreds of other bloggers  I write some political stuff too but few of my pieces are as informed as Brooks’ analyses.

However I’m happy to use Twitter and work for free.   I may win, but we all may lose something after the blogging and Twittering and Adsense dust settles.

Google: Typosquatting for dollars. 32,000,000 of them

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Google is helping to monetize interenet search misspellings, a technique that is estimated to make them 32-50 million per year.   It has also brought them a lawsuit from Edelman, the massive advertising consultancy who has no less than Wal-Mart as a client.

The technique involved is called “typosquatting” and is simply web publishers taking advantage of the many internet mispellings and mishits on keyboards to place advertising for terms like “computors” or “Girmany” or “uPhone” (where the user has accidentally hit the u instead of the i)

A study estimated that monetizing these domains via adsense ads (Google’s revenue share ad service) puts an extra 32-50 million to Google’s bottom line.

I don’t find this objectionable but not clear on the details of the Edelman lawsuit.  I’m guessing they want Google to direct people to the best sites for those terms and not charge rather than send the user to an intermediate site.

Silicon Alley Insider reports

Evil Adsense Publisher 3443918307802676

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Some of my old posts here at WordPress started showing ads, which was odd since I didn’t put any ads up. At first I thought JoeDuck.com had been hacked, but it now appears this is a form of Internet Explorer browser malware that is injecting advertising into the code as you surf. I prefer Firefox to Explorer but the laptop is not working well with Firefox – I think a almost-full-disk memory issue but I don’t want to mess with it now.

SEO Roundtable has a discussion of another WP blog with this problem and the adsense publisher code is the same as in my problem. That’s an old discussion so this probably infects a lot of IE browsers out there by now.

I’m wondering if I should be annoyed with Google for not having a system in place to alert people when they are getting adsense hijacked? Google must know about this WP exploit, and since the code would alert them why can’t they have an automated routine to warn me? Perhaps they can’t ID my compromised machine via an email address? They almost certainly deleted this publisher by now … right? Better email Mr. Adsense himself, Shuman.

News Corp Advertising Network. Under the Radar?

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Facebook’s targeted advertising was criticized heavily last week by bloggers despite Facebook promises to create a better user experience through better targeting of the ads.   I’m guessing users will hardly notice the change, and advertisers will continue to be underwhelmed with the performance of social network advertising although these ads will play an increasingly important role as social networking explodes and the number of page views on social networking sites like Myspace exceeds pageviews on any other site.

I think Myspace now has the top global pageview count which is why the new ad network from News Corp (Myspace’s parent company) is an important development.    It appears they will sneak in under the radar and avoid the heavy criticism levied against Facebook even though presumably they’ll also be working hard to target the ads to the specific Myspace user profiles.