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> Quite who uses this site is unclear. Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to

> Quite who uses this site is unclear. Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site. > Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense. It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palatable to AdSense - but I don't see how any of it would help the AI and/or mechanical turk supposedly assigning target-demographic labels to this site.

bruce511 2y ago
Oh, I agree it's still a crappy site for advertising. He gamed the algorithm to get onto the program. Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid. On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views. I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...
- bitnasty 2y ago
  If he’s getting paid per impression, then I don’t see how the payout will be unexpected terrible considering the site has existing traffic. Of course he could be paid by click, in which case you are probably right.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    Does Adsense pay for impressions? Legit question, I have no idea... I imagine $-per-impression would be impressively low... Isn't $-per-click pretty low anyway?
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  > a few cars a day That's not a fair analogy because the article describes the site like this: > For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic. Sure, we could do with more specific info, but it sounds very far from "a few cars a day" to me.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    It's really hard to know what a "steady stream" is without useful quantification. I mean to you or me a steady stream might be 100 people a day. Or a million. It's hard to say. (And clearly that would be useful knowledge in the context of evaluating the value of the site.) On the other hand, if I was getting a million users per day, I'd probably figure out who would care about that audience, and sell to them directly.

bruce511 2y ago

Oh, I agree it's still a crappy site for advertising. He gamed the algorithm to get onto the program. Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid. On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views. I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...

bitnasty 2y ago
If he’s getting paid per impression, then I don’t see how the payout will be unexpected terrible considering the site has existing traffic. Of course he could be paid by click, in which case you are probably right.
- bruce511 2y ago
  Does Adsense pay for impressions? Legit question, I have no idea... I imagine $-per-impression would be impressively low... Isn't $-per-click pretty low anyway?
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
> a few cars a day That's not a fair analogy because the article describes the site like this: > For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic. Sure, we could do with more specific info, but it sounds very far from "a few cars a day" to me.
- bruce511 2y ago
  It's really hard to know what a "steady stream" is without useful quantification. I mean to you or me a steady stream might be 100 people a day. Or a million. It's hard to say. (And clearly that would be useful knowledge in the context of evaluating the value of the site.) On the other hand, if I was getting a million users per day, I'd probably figure out who would care about that audience, and sell to them directly.