Come June 1st 2007, many Google AdSense publishers’ account will be disabled. Specifically, those that are of ‘Made For AdSense’ (MFA) or ‘arbitrage publisher’ nature. This news follows numerous reports of publishers receiving notices from Google regarding the disabling of their account, citing the reason as their use of AdSense is an unsuitable business model. The ‘unsuitable business model’ being generally understood as MFA sites.

So a little background story here for the uninitiated. Arbitrage is defined as “The simultaneous purchase and sale of similar commodities to take advantage of price discrepancies between markets”. If managed properly, this approach guarantees almost risk free profit. In this case, some clever chaps have devised a way to buy cheap traffic using Google AdWords and using the traffic to click the Google AdSense ads on the site. These sites are termed ‘Made For AdSense’. Normally they offer a little content to tune in to certain categories of AdSense ads.

A simple way of looking at things:
AdSense: $0.20
AdWords: $0.05 -
PROFIT!!: $0.15

Obviously, this doesn’t sit well with Google as well as the advertisers paying good money for the clicks. This has been going on for quite awhile with the people behind the scheme earning some 5-figure USD monthly. Loads of money at the expense of low quality clicks for advertisers.

After much criticism and departures from advertisers, Google has finally taken firm action against the guilty. Goes without saying that a considerable amount of publishers are going to be upset over the stunt. As for what constitutes arbitration or MFA sites, no guidelines have been made public yet. This allows room for debate on whether a website is really MFA or just lacking in content. The slightly good news being, the involved publishers will be paid for whatever they’ve ‘earned’ thus far.

Google isn’t the only one affected by this, many other PPC advertisers are still being used for arbitrating. Overture (and now Yahoo Publishers Network, YPN) being another favorite of the black hat practitioners. No news yet of Yahoo taking similar precautions and it might be unlikely they will, seeing from blog posts such as this one about Yahoo promoting Google arbitrage.

Normal publishers like us might benefit for the increased integrity of AdSense. Disabling MFA accounts may go a long way in bringing back disillusioned advertisers. Existing advertisers probably would pay more per click as well. You won’t see us complaining

External related articles: JenSense | Search-optimization-school | MarketingPilgrim | Google Adsense Adwords Arbitrage

How does this move by AdSense affect you?

Tags: Adsense, Advertising, Adwords, Google, News, PPC, Yahoo, YPN

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