- AOL
- Ad networks
- Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
- Best Practices
- Blogs
- Branding
- CGM
- Careers
- Classifieds
- Content
- Creative
- Design
- Duly Noted
- Games
- IAC/InterActiveCorp
- IM
- Legal & Policy
- Local
- Marketing
- Measurement
- Media
- Microsoft
- Mobile
- MySpace
- New/Cool
- Noteworthy
- Off-Site
- People
- Privacy
- Rich/Streaming/Video
- Search
- Social Networks
- Syndication/RSS
- Viral/Buzz
- Virtual Worlds
- Web Analytics
- Worst Practices
- Yahoo
- YouTube
- agencies
- cannes
- cross-media
- publicis
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 |
« Shock Mag Shuttered, Site Lives On | Main | GreenCine Embedding YouTube Film Trailers »
December 23, 2006
When AdSense Acts Like Gator
Dunno who called and woke me up this morning, because the phone battery died the minute I picked up the handset.
That meant it was time to go online and shop for Panasonic cordless phone batteries. The first result I click (a paid search advertiser), had obviously drunk the Google Kool-Aid, given AdSense ads occupied the bulk of his site's real estate. And what are those ads touting? Why, batteries, of course -- the only product this particular merchant sells.
Lots has been written about contextual ad bloopers, but considerably less about merchants who should perhaps think twice (or three times) about filtering the ads they allow on their sites. AdSense was, after all, created for publishers. You merchants already have ways to monetize your site.
This calls to mind those endless lawsuits against Gator (the ones that forced the copany to change its business model and become Claria). Only in this case, the poor schmuck whose prospective clients are being cordially invited to shop elsewhere are being invited to so so by the merchant himself, not by a scummy adware product.
Or could it be that it's more lucrative to be paid for clicks to batteries than for the batteries themselves?
Posted by Rebecca Lieb at December 23, 2006 10:05 AM
Digg this!
Add to del.icio.us 
Stumble It!
Comments
Post a comment
- Send us feedback |
- FAQ |
- Technical questions or bug reports? |
- Newsletter problems? |
- Site Map |
- ClickZ RSS feeds
- Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC. 2010 All rights reserved. |
- Legal Notices, Licensing, Reprints & Permissions |
- Privacy Policy
Rebecca, I'd be curious to find out which site you were hitting..
Matt Cutts December 26, 2006 9:17 PM
Yes, and they're not the only ones to do it. Even fairly savvy online arbitrage guys like Nextag do it for some of their traffic. Check out https://www2.nextag.com/serv/main/buyer/rfq/submit/36/0/0/form.jsp?&search=&product=100000036 where for home purchase leads instead of just pushing to the lead, they're happy to have people siphoned off by a click, and hopefully more than one click on some of the ads! Sometimes multi-click economics make more sense for people than a single-purchase alone, especially when you consider that the person might still come back and complete the purchase (or the lead referral in Nextag's case) on the merchant's site. This is the key dilemma with multiple types of intermediate-conversion monetization types available out there for publishers/merchats :-)
Rob Leathern December 30, 2006 11:35 AM