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Google Adsense is transitioning to per-impression payments for publishers
- djyaz1200 3y agoDidn't Barry Dillar go see Sergey and Larry early in Google's beginnings? I think the direct quote was "you are f'ing up the magic" referring to the fact that advertisers don't know what's working, and Google was ruining that. Although it's taken them many years they seem to now be taking his advice to heart. I looked to cite this but couldn't find it on Google, so I may be mistaken...
- AuthError 3y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/04/google-ken-auletta https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/04/google-ke... looks like 2 different things (barry dillar met them but larry was on phone which he thought was rude, clicks vs impressions was something google was looking for in CEO (eric schmidt passed that test or something))
- jshen 3y agoenshitification This also means there is a huge opportunity to disrupt google at this pont. edit to add reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
- candiddevmike 3y agoHow do you disrupt a monopoly?
- ipaddr 3y agoOne feature at a time
- jshen 3y agoI don't think that is the right way to think about google. There is virtually no friction or switching cost for a user to use a different search engine. I think the biggest thing keeping google at the top is that they are the default on mobile phones, and they pay a ton of money to apple to keep it that way. I also think that disruption will come from something that looks different than google, maybe something like chatgpt, that doesn't appear to be a direct competitor at first but ends up taking a significant bite out of usage of google.
- plagiarist 3y agoThere is a some amount of friction because browsers default to it and user inertia from using it for decades.
- jshen 3y agoThat's a good point, and I think the big issue here is that Google owns the most popular browser too.
- userinanother 3y agoAnd the billions Apple gets paid to pick Google as the default
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoGoogle's product is not their search engine.
- jshen 3y agoI'm not sure what you mean.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoGoogle sells ad space on certain web properties. Some of those properties are search engines, but that is entirely incidental and not important. What they actually sell is a B2B SaaS for participating in auctions on those web properties.
- kromem 3y agoGoogle was never actually changing that. We still largely don't know what half of advertising works and what half doesn't. There's just more metrics obfuscating that reality. Source: worked on market research focused on identifying what advertising worked and what advertising didn't which Google white labeled
- riku_iki 3y agowas this solved with conversion tracking long ago?..
- kromem 3y agoNot really. For example, did they see a TV ad which primed them before they saw the banner ad they clicked that led to the conversion? I recall a conversation with a CMO who was discussing how all their metrics indicated TV ads were a waste of money, so in a few of their DMAs they pulled TV ads and their sales in those areas dropped by double digits. The additional metric fidelity is a false sense of security in the data. There's a lot more going on to drive someone to purchase than simply the ad tagging that gets picked up. It can be useful in optimizing spend a bit, but should be considered more like correlation than causation. So you can add budget to things that are converting and see if that linearly leads to more conversions, just don't assume that it's as clear cut as a dashboard makes it out to be - it generally won't be and after a few low hanging fruit gains you'll hit diminishing returns because it's not actually as simple as "person sees banner ad A and clicks = 4% chance of sale."
- riku_iki 3y agoold cable TV ads, yes, can't be tracked. Ads on HBO Max and Hulu totally can.
- kromem 3y agoYes. But it goes well beyond just that. For example, you might have 4% of people who clicked through your banner ad end up purchasing. But 80% of those 4% had previously read a CNET review for your product before seeing that ad. How are you getting that data point? And even if you do, it doesn't necessarily mean putting a link to that review on the landing page for the ad will result in much lift, as there may have been a selection bias where most people swayed by a CNET review were the ones who had already read reviews. One of the most influential touch points is WoM. So certainly offline product recommendations aren't ending up in your dashboard, and exposure to social media positive sentiment isn't either. Easily half to 2/3rd of the things someone sees that influence their purchasing decision aren't being picked up by an attribution model for conversion tracking. And "old cable TV ads" . Still an audience of 72 million for those in 2023. And cross platform attribution really isn't as straightforward as you seem to think.
- aaronbrethorst 3y agolol, ok: Safari can’t open the page “https://blog.google/products/adsense/evolving-how-publishers-monetize-with-adsense/”. The error is: “The URL was blocked by a content blocker” (WebKitErrorDomain:104)
- olliej 3y agoOver aggressive adblocker or custom rule?
- aaronbrethorst 3y agoOver-aggressive ad blocker.
- Macha 3y agoI mean, this is the fault of your content blocker being overeager, probably with a *adsense* or *ad* rule in there somewhere
- pests 3y agoI love how the Facebook Ad Manager and Google Ad dashboards all have a helpful warning telling users to disable adblocking lmao. They know even advertisers don't like ads.
- seydor 3y ago> to the display industry standard of paying per impression Huh, who sets the industry standard? Google, google, google and google.
- bragr 3y agoThere are other forms of advertising besides online ads. If you're talking traditional print, billboards, an electronic sign in the mall, radio, etc, then you are talking in terms of impressions per dollar.
- NowThenGoodBad 3y ago*per potential impressions per dollar You can actually use that as a negotiating point. Let's say a new route is opened causing traffic to bypass a normally high traffic point. The advertiser might still price per potential impression per dollar when the reality is significantly different. Not to nitpick but it's important for people to do their homework on this and realize that those selling the ad space are going to price on the higher end of potential impressions.
- omarfarooq 3y agoThe CPM will still factor in click through rates, so it's just a different way of tabulating the same numbers.
- riku_iki 3y agoThe worry is that Google will game auctions and pocket the difference.
- h1fra 3y agoWasn't CPM the norm before the market went to CPC because it was easily gamed by publishers? Also it's funny for them to say "Publishers gets 68%" which sounds huge but actually translates to a staggering 32% fee.
- Scoundreller 3y agoI think YouTube is 50% ! But Adsense was capable of earning so much more than what most could do themselves that I was happy to “pay” them when I ran a semi-popular site. Though CPM can be gamed as well: put the ad at the bottom instead of the top. At the right instead of the left. Can be gamed by publishers too: create an ad that users see but don’t click on, but act on anyway. E.g. an ad for a cola and then you drink one from your fridge. I thought Google basically blended it all together when deciding which ad to present: a poorly clicked ad will need to pay more per click to get displayed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- toast0 3y agoI was working at Yahoo Travel from 2004-2011, and touched a lot of ad stuff, although some of it was indirect. Media/Display ads were normally CPM. Text ads were nearly all CPC (regardless of adwords, yahoo's search marketting, or y!travel's custom advertising market). Some display ads were CPC. There was a small amount of ads where it was CPA (cost per acquisition, advertiser only paid if the user purchased). CPA seemed like it was growing, but details of sales tracking and trust between parties probably gets in the way. Ocassionally we'd have some deal where we would have to put in links that might look like ads, but were unpaid.
- no_wizard 3y agoCPA seems like the fairest model from my laypersons vantage point. Is there a reason this isn't more popular on its face? Only paying for an ad when it works seems like you could charge more for the when it works part as a service (in this case Yahoo Ads or Google Ads) but it allows businesses to run ads at a higher rate if they're willing to give up more money on impression (where impression = someone buys)
- crowcroft 3y agoThe unintended consequence of paying per click is that it heavily incentives bot fraud, despite what Google might say about 'amazing performance' (Taboola is also a CPC model for context). This is also another step towards unifying/supplanting the 'Google' ad network and DoubleClick.
- Scoundreller 3y agoIf clicks can be botted, why can’t impressions? What this does kill is a small time publisher opening up their own website while waiting at the Apple Store and clicking some ads they know will pay a lot. Not that I’d ever do such a thing.
- crazygringo 3y agoIs it just a question of scale? You can easily have 100x or 1000x more impressions than clicks. So detecting fraudulent clicks is much harder than fraudulent impressions, in terms of a proportion of fraud, just because there's so much less of a baseline genuine signal. E.g. 20 fraudulent clicks out of 40 total clicks per day, who can tell? But 20,000 fraudulent impressions out of 40,000 total, now you can do a lot more pattern recognition to filter them out.
- Scoundreller 3y agoIf those 20 fraud clicks didn’t come from a source similar to 2000-20000 pageviews, they should be able to pick out something happening. Like. You’re right: it’s easier for a small-time fraudster to do cpc fraud, but they should still be able detect suspicious page views, whether there’s a click involved or not. At cpc large scale fraud, there’s a lot of data either way.
- crazygringo 3y agoNot necessarily at all. The profile of people who click on an ad may be very different from those who just see it. The point is that small numbers just don't let you make confident conclusions period.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- josephjrobison 3y agoAnother tweak to the infinite money glitch
- josefresco 3y agoSo, like Facebook advertising? Honestly I don't trust a single number Google gives me in Google Ads so this probably isn't much of a loss/change.
- varispeed 3y agoRegulators should at very least force Google, Facebook and other to use independent corporations for metrics and force them to be publicly available for audit.
- vizzah 3y agoHow this works better for advertisers? I constantly see full-page ads on mobile devices within apps and web sites. I ignore them and click [x] to close. Is this going to count as an impression now and earn revenue? On this blog post Google says: "Publishers in our ad network are required to adhere to both our AdSense policies and the Better Ads Standards which do not allow practices like pop-ups or interruptive ads that take up the majority of the screen." But full page ads which interrupt your flow are a standard on AdSense. Impressions
- avbanks 3y agoIf you see it, thats already a counted impression.
- vizzah 3y agoAnd that is the point. Suddenly advertised are charged for something I haven't even looked into and had no interest whatsoever (as opposed to clicking on ad to find out more).
- avbanks 3y agoAdvertisers also have the option of paying for clicks. Paying for impressions is also pretty valuable, this isn't a secret advertisers understand how impressions work. https://www.bluewinston.com/dictionary/ppi-pay-per-impression/#:~:text=PPI%20is%20most%20often%20used,interest%20us%20in%20PPC%20advertising https://www.bluewinston.com/dictionary/ppi-pay-per-impressio....
- JohnMakin 3y ago> For years, AdSense has been transparent about the fee we charge for our service, which is consistent with industry rates. When publishers have chosen to use AdSense to monetize their content, they have kept 68% of the revenue. Unless, of course, when you go to cash out you run into their absurd KYC that will arbitrarily get rejected (you only get 1 chance), or they cancel your account for reasons, and there is absolutely no recourse. They are happy taking your business before that though, of course.
- _jal 3y agoYeah, the business model is remarkably similar to the credit card fraud reshippers. Keep your mules busy until is time to pay out and then ghost them.
- _rrnv 3y agoHappened to me too when i was a student, earned $300, tried withdrawing and they just froze my account, for "fraud clicks". It's Google's long tail business model to not filter fraud out on the go and instead just lead small site owner on. On a global scale I expect billions in additional revenue, but no global court to challenge Google with a class-action. Maybe someday...
- pests 3y agoI earned a couple hundred with them too when I was young. Never claimed it. They eventually released it to my states unclaimed property system and a decade later I got it from that.
- JohnMakin 3y agoThey got me on a hobby site for about $5k. No real reason given, just rejected my ID verification with no appeal possible. hundreds of similar stories out there
- miohtama 3y agoThere was an era when Google’s slogan was ”Don’t do evil.” It was so long time ago that most of have not even heard about it today.
- jdalgetty 3y agoI think this a way for them to pay small publishers less.
- GoRudy 3y agoGoogle's premium ad network for professional publishers is AdX which is run via the google ad manager product and has been on a CPM basis for over a decade. Only small sites are on adsense which pays CPC. The net change here is probably almost nothing, just the smaller sites that never use google ad manager will see the change but any publisher of note will have been operating with this for as long as they can remember. With click through rates continuing to decrease it's likely they needed to make this change to keep the long tail sites happy and generating some revenue, they would back out the CPC to an effective CPM anyway. Me:13+ years in digital publishing and advertising.
- THENATHE 3y agoAs a general market trend, why are click through rates decreasing? Is it because of the availability of information without going to a site?
- currio 3y agoIt could be because of number of ads shown per query. As number of competing ads goes up CTR goes down.
- jacquesm 3y ago> As a general market trend, why are click through rates decreasing? Because the advertising industry has structurally educated users to try their hardest to ignore the ads, resulting in every more obnoxious ads, which are then even more forcefully ignored. And that in turn gave rise to adblockers, which are now more or less a requirement if you don't want to lose your sanity while browsing the web.
- shados 3y ago> which are now more or less a requirement if you don't want to lose your sanity while browsing the web For a long time I wondered why people said this. I don't use ad blockers and didn't feel it was that bad. Then 2 things made me understand. First, I pay for YouTube. If you don't and don't block their ads, they seriously test your patience as you browse. I tried it for less than an hour before I couldn't take it anymore. The second was looking for torrents and hacks (it was for a legitimate and unambiguously legal purpose too, no gray area, but long story!). Those sites are literally impossible to use without ad blockers. Same thing for tools related to diagnosing PC issues. It's all ads over ads over scams and trying to get you to install some adware as you navigate the site trying to install the actually legitimate tools. I very rarely do either of those things (YouTube without subscription, and navigating the "gray" web), so I never realized just how fucking awful it can get.
- wyncent 3y agoIf Google will pay per view, what incentive will Google have to personalize ads?
- thornewolf 3y agogoogle pays money: per view on publisher website google gets money: per click on publisher website google is incentivized to maximize click chance per view in this system
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- varispeed 3y agoI just hope EU gets properly onto this racket and forces Google to close Adsense.
- londons_explore 3y agoPer impression payments are more vulnerable to fraud... Hide the ad unit in some hidden background layer and you're still gonna get paid for impressions even if no human eyeballs see it... And you'll get away with it too, because as long as you have millions of web pages and each one only gets a little traffic, there won't be enough statistical power to see that they are underperforming vs just unlucky that none of the first 85 impressions led to a click. This is already rampant in mobile games.
- Mechanical9 3y agoDoesn't the price per impression still get adjusted based on performance?
- londons_explore 3y agoYes, but only when there is enough performance data. The reality of the web is there is a huge long tail of sites that don't get enough impressions to get a good gauge of click through or conversion data - and the fraud makes use of that to make money.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoCPM is already the industry standard in most environment, and a cottage industry of analysis/anti-fraud tools have sprung up to fight exactly the kind of hidden ads your describing. (In other words, people are aware of this problem.)
- ss64 3y agoI wonder if this is related to the current YouTube vs uBlock war? Could be that a bunch of people have given up on ad-blocking and are just blindly clicking every single ad then immediately closing the new tab to get to the video. Result on CPC will be ad payments going through the roof, but actual conversions trending down to zero.
- lxgr 3y agoYes, this seems to be a thing: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adjkley 3y agoSo will the cost of clicking on ads be reduced?
- dave333 3y agoIndividual web pages will vary a lot in the relative performance of CPM vs CPC, so "not much change" is averaged over many sites. I had an old page of curated links to games that I never updated and the ad targeting was so good the page had a huge click through rate, mostly because the ads were by far the most interesting thing on the page. Another puzzle site I had was the opposite where people could spend 20 minutes to an hour solving a puzzle with just a single page refresh and one ad impression.
- Buzzcheep 3y agoMaybe this transition to pay per impressions will help in resolving the issue of unnecessary ad limits