Sections

• Overview
• Google AdSense Review
• Media.net Review (top AdSense alternative)
• Amazon Associates
• Facebook Audience Network
• Chitika Review (now defunct)
• Yahoo! Publisher Network (now defunct)
• Microsoft pubCenter
• in-text contextual ads
• other affiliate networks
• display & self serve networks
• content recommendation networks

Overview

AdSense Review

Overall Rating

Why Publishers Like It

It is generally seen as the gold standard of contextual ad programs. Google owns about a third of the global online ad market & has a higher share in some locations (especially outside of the US, China & South Korea) as well as some categories like mobile & search ads.

When it works, it can be a terrific set-n-forget revenue source which helps subsidize the creation of additional online content. A number of great features are

• industry leading payouts (due to the depth of their ad network)
• combining contextual, display, site targeting & ad retargeting in a single offering
• the ability to tie it in with Google Analytics (to give granular page-level performance data)
• the ability to serve ads using DoubleClick for Publishers (which allows features like also selling direct ads & setting links to open in a new window)

One of the other features which was fantastic was the ability to tie click performance back to keyword data. That is still somewhat possible, however Google currently hides keyword data on about 90% of organic search traffic and Yahoo! hides keyword data on about 50% of search traffic, so the ability to "close the loop" on the keyword level performance data is not as strong as it once was.

Growing Success With Partners

The success of AdSense has led to the founding of multiple ad yield optimization startups like AdPushup and Ezioc. Companies like them test different ad layouts, ad colors and placement locations, sharing much of the incremental ad yield with publishers.

Why People Dislike It - Poor Communications & Bans

A limited amount of competition over the years has caused them to be aggressive & adversarial toward many of their partners. For years they refused to disclose ad revenue share & they only disclosed it in 2010 after a lawsuit in Italy forced them to. At one point Larry Page even stated he thought the concept of customer support is ridiculous.

There have been numerous cases where longstanding accounts were banned out of the blue without warning - with the most recent earning period clawed back.

Some individuals have complained to regulators or taken them to court over the practice, however such a fight can be expensive & time consuming, and success is not guaranteed. More recently there has been an alleged employee leak, reports of accounts being closed right before publisher payouts are due, and a class action lawsuit.

Even outside of account bans, some publishers still face significant margin risk as Google's priorities change. Demand Media's eHow is indeed a cautionary tale.

As Google reshapes the web in its own image, on highly commercial keywords it publishes search result pages which are almost entirely ads or "knowledge graph" listings with ads above the fold. And then they roll out algorithms which penalize publishers for being too "ad heavy." Yet if you look at their heat map, the "best practices" almost seem like a recipe for trouble. And old case studies from publishers long since penalized have been removed.

Their program can seem rock solid while it is working, but the level of churn is quite high. In this article Susan Wojcicki mentioned Google has "some 2 million sites" in their display network. In a 2012 blog post they published the following graph, highlighting how they had disabled ad serving to about 1.5 million sites in the 4 years prior.

In early 2014 they followed up that post with another one, highlighting the following stats for 2013:

we had blacklisted more than 200,000 total publisher pages, an encouraging decline from last year, and disapproved more than 3,000,000 attempts to join our AdSense network. We also removed more than 250,000 publisher accounts for various policy violations.

If each publisher has an average of 1 website, that would indicate something like a 12.5% of publishers faced banning in 2013. If each publisher has an average of 2 sites, it would mean they banned 25% of their partners in a single year - and these bans are lifetime bans.

Consider how they banned AdBlock Plus from their Play Store, only to later allow it once Google search ads were re-enabled in the plugin, yet AdSense ads on publisher sites remained blocked by the plugin.

>>> Sign up to activate your AdSense publisher account today.

Multiple other partners work to syndicate Google ads without requiring the publisher have a direct relationship with Google. Perhaps the most popular among these are Ezioc & adpushup. Others would include services like Clickio & The Moneytizer. I unfortunately haven't had the time to test out all these sorts of third party ad mediation services, but in some cases it could certainly make sense to test them if you had trouble opening an AdSense account or wanted to not have all your ad revenue tied to a single network that might scrub over 10% of their partners in any given year.

Onto the top competing contextual ad networks...

Media.net

Overall Rating

Exciting offer...

General Review

Many smaller networks which are AdSense competitors have a huge fall off, to where if you earned 50 cents or a dollar a click with AdSense, you'd see penny and nickle clicks. Thankfully Media.net is nothing like that & they are perhaps the best at competing on a eCPM basis. Their interface is quite easy to use, both in terms of creating & customizing new ad units and in tracking performance reports.

In most markets Media.net won't vastly outperform AdSense, but it is certainly worth testing & may do far better than one would expect, particularly in light of how weak the Yahoo! Publisher Network performed many years ago. I've read some Media.net reviews which were a bit negative, but many of those were from people earning under $1 a day or such. Since Media.net lacks Google's advertising network depth & scale, they try to offset that with better ad integration using a manually intensive work process to really help the ads match the look and feel of your sites. It is worth noting that unless you have a decent amount of scale they probably won't be able to justify spending a lot of resources working on custom ad integration for your website.

Competition shifts the balance of power. When companies feel like they don't have to compete they can start believing things like "the whole concept of customer support is absurd." Even if using Media.net were revenue neutral, it would still be worth doing in order to help shift that balance of power in favor of publishers. Some other large web players like Mozilla Firefox have certainly indicated they understand the importance of that sort of competition.

A Successful Exit

Media.net was so successful they were acquired for $900 million, even while Yahoo! itself sold for only $4.8 billion. The success of Media.net has led to other companies like Inuvo trying to build similar offerings. System1 (formerly OpenMail) acquired InfoSpace for $45 million and has access to the Bing and Google ad feeds, but Media.net still remains the unmatched #1 competitor to Google AdSense.

Great Features

• Competitive eCPM when compared against AdSense in many categories.
• Particularly strong ad performance on mobile devices.
• Can be used in conjunction with AdSense.
• Has some standard ad unit sizes & some that are custom, which gives you flexibility in terms of integrating them in typical ad spots and in terms of having units which look different than common ones and thus have greater eye appeal than a standard 468x60 or 728x90 banner.
• Leverages the Yahoo! Bing Network, which gives it a fairly decent advertiser base & network scale to tap into to ensure there are relevant ads for most topics. I believe one thing that has helped them do so well is Microsoft has done a much better job on pricing click quality than many networks did in years past.
• Since they are not a monopoly, Media.net believes in the concept of customer service & their partner communications are much clearer. You don't have to pull down millions of dollars a year to be considered a valued partner.
• Their customer support team not only communicates clearly with publishers, but also works to help improve ad integration. Support is perhaps one of their best attributes.
• Once your account has been established and they see strong traffic quality they are generally quite quick at approving any additional sites you add to your account.
• In addition to offering contextual ads, Media.net has a partnership to serve Google display ads (though publishers have to be invited to have those features enabled).
• While earning statistics are not real-time, they provide them the following day.
• Fast Net-30 payouts.

Drawbacks

The main drawbacks would be:

• They require English as your primary language & that your site receives the majority of its traffic from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. If you operate outside those markets, then they wouldn't be a great fit at the moment (though who knows where they may be in a couple years as Bing gets more aggressive with international expansion). The acquisition by a Chinese company promises to accelerate international growth (particularly in China) and drive further ad expansion in video and other formats.
• It can take a while to get a new account approved, so it is worth applying early to have some experience and to have a backup in place in case anything should happen to your AdSense account.
• Inability to split test units (though if you are doing enough volume your customer support person will help set up and implement a split test for you).
• While they do offer statistics on a per-site, per-day & per-ad unit basis (along with pageview stats), they currently do not offer data down to the page or keyword level. They provide data on earnings, pageviews & eCPM; but they currently do not provide click or CPC data. (I believe they will be adding more granular metrics fairly soon).
• With Yahoo! getting acquired by Verizon & Media.net getting acquired by a Chinese company, it remains to be seen if Media.net will enjoy the same revenue share with upstream ad partners & if they will be able to keep passing on such a high revenue share to partners using their network.

>>> Sign up to activate your Media.net publisher account today.

Amazon Associates

Overall Rating

Amazon enjoys an amazing share of ecommerce sales and they are growing their share of market over time. Their broad selection means that if something is for sale online there is a good chance they have it listed on their site, and there is a good chance users already have an account registered with them, so that boosts conversion rates on desktop and mobile devices. They are to ecommerce as Google is to search and Facebook is to social.

Their affiliate program comes via tiered structure, where the more items you sell each month the higher a revenue share they offer. Their tiers and guidelines may change over time, but here is a chart as of September 2016 to highlight the general approach.

Select categories like computers may have a lower revenue share & a max capped commission per sale. They have also implemented some other rules to prevent gaming the system with free ebook downloads and other "purchases" of dubious commercial value. Click here to see more about Amazon's current category-based payments and volume tiers.

Amazon's affiliate cookie is quite short at only 24 hours, but this is somewhat offset by their high conversion rates & by many consumers who visit their site to buy x and also buy y and z while they are there.

Amazon launched Native Shopping Ads which can be automatically targeted using on-page content to drive relevancy, or webmasters can programmatically drive ad topics using a page's title or a different custom variable set up for ad targeting.

Amazon also moved into offering a retargeting display network for publishers, which leverages consumer browsing and shopping behavior on Amazon.com to improve ad relevancy.

Some sites are a good fit for AdSense & some sites are a good fit for affiliate programs. In some cases using them in combination can drive incremental revenues without cannibalizing existing revenue streams.

The more diverse your income pool is the less a risk of something going astray if any given partner shuts down or arbitrarily banning you.

Amazon has also quietly launched an ad network by invite. Mid-sized publishers can request access to their Unified Ad Marketplace, though it requires using Google's DFP for ad serving.

Facebook Audience Network

Overall Rating

Facebook believes they have strategically superior user information based on the usage of their mobile app. They have tried to extend their ad network out to the desktop web, but pulled back due to high prevalence of fraud. The Facebook Audience Network is thus primarily for monetizing mobile applications and mobile websites. They offer typical banner ads, interstitial ads & are experimenting with video ads.

There is a significant gap between what Facebook typically charges for ad clicks on their owned and operated sites versus what they charge for clicks on ads to partner sites. A few weeks ago a friend sent me the following example of a new campaign he set up to highlight how large this gap can be.

In the longer term, Facebook is more interested in pulling content into their website rather than spreading their ad network outward. This ad network may be effective for monetizing mobile games, but for traditional websites the yields are not remarkably high. It is typically perhaps closer to something like an Outbrain rather than a Google AdSense or Media.net in terms of yield.

Chitika

Chitika Ad Network Shut Down

On April 17, 2019 Chitika announced it was shutting down immediately. Back in 2010 when Yahoo! announced they were shutting down the Yahoo! Publisher Network they recommended publishers shift to using Chitika. The network had a lot of exposure on many prominent blogs, so the abrupt closure of Chitika took many publishers by surprise.

Overall Rating

Chitika launched in 2003 and made waves with their eMiniMalls back in 2005. Darren Rowse helped put them on the map when he reviewed them after seeing great performance on his photography website. As a smaller independent third party service they kept innovating by cleverly used signals like search keyword to help drive ad targeting on the landing page. Of course after Google defaulted to keyword (not provided) on organic search Chitika had to lean harder into a variety of other signals - like file names.

That Chitika is around over a decade after launching is a testament to their fortitude and fighting spirit, as many providers which launched after them have already been shut down. AdBrite was created the year before Chitika and shut down on February 1, 2013. Yahoo! launched their own program (named the Yahoo! Publisher Network) on August 2, 2005 but announced its closure on March 31, 2010. When they closed down they recommended publishers use Chitika.

Great Features

• Account approval is quite fast. You can add the ad code to new sites quickly after your account is approved.
• Offers a variety of ad formats including contextual ads, ad links, inline text ads, and a footer bar option.
• Daily stat updates on clicks, CPC, earnings, pageviews & eCPMs.
• Fast payouts.

Drawbacks

• When doing side by side tests we've generally seen lower earnings from Chitika than Media.net or Google AdSense. If your site is about a fairly low commercial interest topic where click prices are fairly low across the board then Chitika can be decently competitive, but if your sites cover topics where clicks often go for multiple dollars there tends to be a more significant fall off.
• While Chitikia automatically approves new accounts, I believe the initial ad feed they offer might be a more basic one with lower earnings potential. Sometimes you have to wait a few days in order for your CPC to really ramp up.

Join Today

>>> Sign up to activate your Chitika publisher account today.

Yahoo! Publisher Network

CLOSED
Yahoo! launched their own contextual ad program (named the Yahoo! Publisher Network) on August 2, 2005 but announced its closure on March 31, 2010. When they closed down they recommended publishers use Chitika. Yahoo! ultimately had a couple problems which prevented them from competing:

• their ads were primarily driven by max CPC rather than relevancy matching, which caused many publishers to complain about Vonange ads everywhere
• they did not use smart pricing to optimize ad click costs as well as Google did
• their ad network was not quite as deep

The third of the above 3 wouldn't have mattered so much if the first issue wasn't so overt.

After shutting down in 2010, Yahoo! announced they inked a long-term agreement with Media.net on September 27, 2012 to run a contextual ad program (which was reviewed above). In 2013 Yahoo! also signed a non-exclusive deal with Google to syndicate AdSense and mobile AdMob ads.

Microsoft pubCenter

Overall Rating

Microsoft has an ad program named pubCenter. However they only briefly had it open to smaller independent webmasters before shifting it toward focusing primarily on mobile ads and Windows 8 apps. When it first opened up via a YieldBuild partnership it performed strongly, but then they used smart pricing to drive down ad rates.

If you are not developing mobile apps for Windows phones & Windows 8 apps you are probably better off working with Media.net to leverage Bing's network.

In-Text Ad Networks: Infolinks vs Kontera vs Vibrant Media Intellitxt

Overall Rating

We have tested all of these to some degree, but have never seen a huge lift from them when compared against the above mentioned programs.

In many cases the "in-text" ad networks promote themselves as offering free incremental revenues, however if a site's user experience is worse & users click the back button quicker that can not only impact the pageviews of the visitor (as someone who clicks back doesn't view a second page), but those sorts of negative engagement metrics can also fold into algorithms like Google's Panda, which can cause the site to ranked lower in the search results.

And if that were not bad enough, Google is looking down upon these types of ads in their manual review process as well. The March 31, 2014 leaked version of Google's remote rater guidelines state:

• "Ads and should be arranged so as not to distract from the MC—Ads and SC are there should the user want them, but they should be easily “ignorable” if the user is not interested."
• "It should be clear what parts of the page are Ads, either by explicit labeling or simply by page organization or design."
• "Many Ads or highly distracting Ads on the visible part of the page when it first loads in the browser (before you do any scrolling), making it difficult to read the MC."
• "the popover ads (the words that are double underlined in blue) can make the main content difficult to read, resulting in a poor user experience."

In the above, the MC stands for [main content] and SC stands for [supplemental content]. What they are saying there is that ads blended into the main content can create a poor user experience and thus be justification for giving the site a poor rating. If enough remote raters flag a site as being a poor user experience, that could flag it for review & have engineers penalize the site with a manual penalty.

The above "engagement" sort of issues related to the Panda algorithm are also why I generally don't like pop ups or aggressive overlays like Undertone or similar on smaller niche sites. I'm even hesitant to use something like Adiply, let alone something as aggressive as Exit Junction.

These in-text ads are becoming more widespread. Viglink and Skimlinks are automated affiliate monetization solutions for those who do not want to have to sign up with numerous sites and networks. BrandCrumb is a similar solution which has select brands registered. LinkSmart is yet another in-text ad network.

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The above were some of the better known contextual providers, but there are are a variety of other ad formats to monetize sites with, including: display, content recommendation, video, mobile and affiliate marketing. We review some of the other options below.

Other Affiliate Networks

• The eBay Partner Network is great for sites which promote vintage goods & collectibles.
• CJ affiliate by Conversant is the new name for Commission Junction, which has long been the #1 online affiliate network.
• Rakuten LinkShare has for years fought CJ for the leadership position in the affiliate network space.
• ShareASale is a growing affiliate network which has been growing their share in the market for years.
• Viglink and Skimlinks are automated affiliate monetization solutions for those who do not want to have to sign up with numerous sites and networks. BrandCrumb is a similar solution which has select brands registered.
• Clickbank is a leading marketplace for digital downloads. They skew heavy toward the "get rich quick" niche, but if you get out of the biz op are some of their products might be decent. Since they sell high margin digital products the typical affiliate commission is a far higher percent than merchants selling physical goods.
• MyCommerce - a more upscale Clickbank-like digital maketplace by Digital River, which skews primarily toward software.

Display Ads & Self-serve Providers

There are many types of networks and options for display.

• Ad servers / self-serve sales: there are dozens of options for self-served display. To highlight a few: DoubleClick for Publisher, OpenX, AdJuggler, IndustryBrains & BuySellAds. Some of them have a variety of ways to differentiate their offerings, like DoubleClick for Publisher backfills with AdSense and BuySellAds has easy on-site signup options and helps pitch some of their publishers to advertisers. Publishers selling directly can of course also differentiate their offerings from the generic offerings by surveying their audience and offering custom sponsorship integration opportunities.
• Display ads: once again, there are many. To highlight a few: TribalFusion, Sovrn, PulsePoint, Rubicon Project, Vertoz, Advertising.com, Adblade.com, Adknowledge, Conversant Media, Bidvertiser, & Casale Media.
• Video networks: once again there are numerous options including: YouTube Partner Program, Adap.tv, BrightRoll, Tremor Video, Videology, SpotXChange, LiveRail, Adobe Auditute, Microsoft Advertising & YuMe.
• Mobile: there are many mobile & app ad options including: Google's AdMob, Apple iAd, Airpush, Facebook Audience Network, Twitter's MoPub, Microsoft pubCenter & Amazon mobile ad network

Content Recommendation

These appear on various mainstream media sites as "also in the news" or "from around the web" or similar. Here is an example:

• Outbrain is the king of this category.
• Taboola originally was video focused, but also does other news recommendations.
• Yahoo! Recommends is an option for larger publishers.
• Disqus was originally a comment platform, but they added advertising slots to the top of their comments.
• There are also some vertical content recommendation ad networks like Dianomi for financial ads.

Last Updated: April 26, 2019.

Google announced they rolled out their local carousel results on desktops in categories like hotels, dining & nightlife for US English search queries. The ranking factors driving local rank are aligned with the same ones that were driving the old 7 pack result set.

The layout seems to be triggered when there are 5 or more listings. One upside to the new layout is that clicks within the carousel might not fall off quite as quickly as they do with vertical listings, so if you don't rank #1 you might still get plenty of traffic.

The default amount of useful information offered by the new layout is less than the old layout provided, while requiring user interaction with the result set to get the information they want. You get a picture, but the only way the phone number is in the result set is if you click into that result set or conduct a branded query from the start.

If you search for a general query (say "Indian restaurants") and want the phone number of a specific restaurant, you will likely need to click on that restaurant's picture in order to shift the search to that restaurant's branded search result set to pull their phone number & other information into the page. In that way Google is able to better track user engagement & enhance personalization on local search. When people repeatedly click into the same paths from logged in Google user accounts then Google can put weight on the end user behavior.

This multi-click process not only gives Google usage data to refine rankings with, but it also will push advertisers into buying branded AdWords ads.

Where this new result set is a bit of a train wreck for navigational searches is when a brand is fairly generic & aligned with a location as part of the business name. For instance, in Oakland there is a place named San Francisco Pizza. Even if you do that branded search, you still get the carousel & there might also be three AdWords ads above the organic search results.

If that company isn't buying branded AdWords ads, they best hope that their customers have large monitors, don't use Google, or are better than the average searcher at distinguishing between AdWords & organic results.

Some of Google's other verticals may appear above the organic result set too. When searching for downtown Oakland hotels they offer listings of hotels in San Francisco & Berkeley inside the hotel onebox.

Perhaps Google can patch together some new local ad units that work with the carousel to offer local businesses a flat-rate monthly ad product. A lot of advertisers would be interested in testing a subscription product that enabled them to highlight selected user reviews and include other options like ratings & coupons & advertiser control of the image. As the search result set becomes the destination some of Google's ad products can become much more like Yelp's.

In the short term the new layout is likely a boon for Yelp & some other local directory plays. Whatever segment of the search audience that dislike's the new carousel will likely be shunted into many of these other local directories.

In the longrun some of these local directories will be the equivalent of MapQuest. As Google gains confidence they will make their listings richer & have more confidence in entirely displacing the result set. The following search isn't a local one, but is a good example of where we may be headed. Even though the search is set to "web" results (rather than "video" results) the first 9 listings are from YouTube.

Update: In addition to the alarming rise of further result displacement, the 2-step clickthrough process means that local businesses will lose even more keyword referral data, as many of the generic queries are replaced by their branded keywords in analytics data.

In spite of Yahoo! accepting revenue guarantees for another year from Microsoft, recently there has been speculation that Yahoo! might want to get out of their search ad deal with Microsoft. I am uncertain if the back channeled story is used as leverage to secure ongoing minimum revenue agreements, or if Yahoo! is trying to set the pretext narrative to later be able to push through a Google deal that might otherwise get blocked by regulators.

When mentioning Yahoo!'s relative under-performance on search, it would be helpful to point out the absurd amount of their "search" traffic from the golden years that was various forms of arbitrage. Part of the reason (likely the primary reason) Yahoo! took such a sharp nose dive in terms of search revenues (from $551 million per quarter to as low as $357 million per quarter) was that Microsoft used quality scores to price down the non-search arbitrage traffic streams & a lot of that incremental "search" volume Yahoo! had went away.

There were all sorts of issues in place that are rarely discussed. Exit traffic, unclosible windows, forcing numerous clicks, iframes in email spam, raw bot clicks, etc. ... and some of this was tied to valuable keyword lists or specific juicy keywords. I am not saying that Google has outright avoided all arbitrage (Ask does boatloads of it in paid + organic & Google at one point tested doing some themselves on credit cards keywords) but it has generally been a sideshow at Google, whereas it was the main attraction at Yahoo!.

And that is what drove down Yahoo!'s click prices.

Yahoo! went from almost an "anything goes" approach to their ad feed syndication, to the point where they made a single syndication partner Cyberplex's Tsavo Media pay them $4.8 million for low quality traffic. There were a number of other clawbacks that were not made public.

Given that we are talking $4.8 million for a single partner & this alleged overall revenue gap between Google AdWords & Bing Ads is somewhere in the $100 million or so range, these traffic quality issues & Microsoft cleaning up the whoring of the ad feed that Yahoo! partners were doing is a big deal. It had a big enough impact that it caused some of the biggest domain portfolios to shift from Yahoo! to Google. I am a bit surprised to see it so rarely mentioned in these discussions.

Few appreciate how absurd the abuses were. For years Yahoo! not only required you to buy syndication (they didn't have a Yahoo!-only targeting option until 2010 & that only came about as a result of a lawsuit) but even when you blocked a scammy source of traffic, if that scammy source was redirecting through another URL you would have no way of blocking the actual source, as mentioned by Sean Turner:

To break it down, yahoo gives you a feed for seobook.com & you give me a feed for turner.com. But all links that are clicked on turner.com redirect through seobook.com so that it shows up in customer logs as seobook.com If you block seobook.com, it will block ads from seobook.com, but not turner.com. The blocked domain tool works on what domains display, not on where the feed is redirected through. So if you are a customer, there is no way to know that turner.com is sending traffic (since it’s redirecting through seobook.com) and no way to block it through seobook.com since that tool only works on the domain that is actually displaying it.

I found it because we kept getting traffic from gogogo.com. We had blocked it over and over and couldn’t figure out why they kept sending us traffic. We couldn’t find our ad on their site. I went to live.com and ran a site:gogogo.com search and found that it indexed some of those landing pages that use gogogo.com as a monetization service.

The other thing that isn't mentioned is the longterm impact of a Yahoo! tie up with Google. Microsoft pays Yahoo! an 88% revenue share (and further guarantees on top of that), provides the organic listings free, manages all the technology, and allows Yahoo! to insert their own ads in the organic results.

If Bing were to exit the online ad market, maybe Yahoo! could make an extra $100 million in the first year of an ad deal with Google, but if there is little to no competition a few years down the road, then when it comes time for Yahoo! to negotiate revenue share rates with Google, you know Google would cram down a bigger rake.

This isn't blind speculation or theory, but aligned with Google's current practices. Look no further than Google's current practices with YouTube, where "partners" are paid different rates & are forbidden to mention their rates publicly: "The Partner Program forbids participants to reveal specifics about their ad-share revenue."

Transparency is a one way street.

Google further dips into leveraging that "home team always wins" mode of negotiating rates by directly investing in some of the aggregators/networks which offer sketchy confidential contracts < ahref="http://obviouslybenhughes.com/post/13933948148/before-you-sign-that-machinima-contract-updated">soaking the original content creators.:

As I said, the three images were posted on yfrog. They were screenshots of an apparently confidential conversation had between MrWonAnother and a partner support representative from Machinima, in which the representative explained that the partner was locked indefinitely into being a Machinima partner for the rest of eternity, as per signed contract. I found this relevant, informative and honestly shocking information and decided to repost the images to obviouslybenhughes.com in hopes that more people would become aware of the darker side of YouTube partnership networks.

Negotiating with a monopoly that controls the supply chain isn't often a winning proposition over the long run.

Competition (or at least the credible risk of it) is required to shift the balance of power.

The flip side of the above situation - where competition does help market participants to get a better revenue share - can be seen in the performance of AOL in their ad negotiation in 2005. AOL's credible threat to switched to Microsoft had Google invest a billion Dollars into AOL, where Google later had to write down $726 million of that investment. If there was no competition from Microsoft, AOL wouldn't have received that $726 million (and likely would have had a lower revenue sharing rate and missed out on some of the promotional AdWords credits they received).

The same sort of "shifted balance of power" was seen in the Mozilla search renewal with Google, where Google paid Mozilla 3X as much due to a strong bid from Microsoft.

The iPad search results are becoming more like phone search results, where ads dominate the interface & a single organic result is above the fold. And Google pushed their "ehnanced" ad campaigns to try to push advertisers into paying higher ad rates on those clicks. It would be a boon for Google if they can force advertisers to pay the same CPC as desktop & couple it with that high mobile ad CTR.

Google owning Chrome + Android & doing deals with Apple + Mozilla means that it will be hard for either Microsoft or Yahoo! to substantially grow search marketshare. But if they partner with Google it will be a short term lift in revenues and dark clouds on the horizon.

I am not claiming that Microsoft is great for Yahoo!, or that they are somehow far better than Google, only that Yahoo! is in a far better position when they have multiple entities competing for their business (as highlighted in the above Mozilla & AOL examples).

Since the disavow tool has come out SEOs are sending thousands of "remove my link" requests daily. Some of them come off as polite, some lie & claim that the person linking is at huge risk of their own rankings tank, some lie with faux legal risks, some come with "extortionisty" threats that if they don't do it the sender will report the site to Google or try to get the web host to take down the site, and some come with payment/bribery offers.

If you want results from Google's jackassery game you either pay heavily with your time, pay with cash, or risk your reputation by threatening or lying broadly to others.

At the same time, Google has suggested that anyone who would want payment to remove links is operating below board. But if you receive these inbound emails (often from anonymous Gmail accounts) you not only have to account for the time it would take to find the links & edit your HTML, but you also have to determine if the person sending the link removal request represents the actual site, or if it is someone trying to screw over one of their competitors. Then, if you confirm that the request is legitimate, you either need to further expand your page's content to make up for the loss of that resource or find a suitable replacement for the link that was removed. All this takes time. And if that time is from an employee that means money.

There have been hints that if a website is disavowed some number of times that data can be used to further go out & manually penalize more websites, or create link classifications for spam.

... oh no ...

Social engineering is the most profitable form of engineering going on in the 'Plex.

The last rub is this: if you do value your own life at nothing in a misguided effort to help third parties (who may have spammed up your site for links & then often follow it up with lying to you to achieve their own selfish goals), how does that reflect on your priorities and the (lack of) quality in your website?

If you contacted the large branded websites that Google is biasing their algorithms toward promoting, do you think those websites would actually waste their time & resources removing links to third party websites? For free?

Color me skeptical.

As a thought experiment, look through your backlinks for a few spam links that you know are hosted by Google (eg: Google Groups, YouTube, Blogspot, etc.) and try to get Google's webmaster to help remove those links for you & let us know how well that works out for you.

Some of the larger monopoly & oligopolies don't offer particularly useful customer service to their paying customers. For example, track how long it takes you to get a person on the other end of the phone with a telecom giant, a cable company, or a mega bank. Better yet, look at how long it took AdWords to openly offer phone support & the non-support they offer AdSense publishers (remember the bit about Larry Page believing that "the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous?")

For the non-customer Google may simply recommend that the best strategy is to "start over."

When Google aggregates Webmaster Tools link data from penalized websites they can easily make 2 lists:

• sites frequently disavowed
• sites with links frequently removed

If both lists are equally bad, then you are best off ignoring the removal requests & spending your time & resources improving your site.

If I had to guess, I would imagine that being on the list of "these are the spam links I was able to remove" is worse than being on the list of "these are the links I am unsure about & want to disavow just in case."

What say you?

I understand Google's desire to have a clean editorial signal & not wanting people to manipulate the web graph.

But Google once again isn't following the best practices they dish out for others.

Both of the following are not one-off articles, but are part of a "series" of advertorials for various Google products with direct followed links to AdWords, Google Analytics, Chromebook, & Hangouts.

Check the date on this next one: February 19th, the same day Interflora was penalized by Google. This is something that is an ongoing practice for Google, while they penalize others for doing the same thing.

Is using payment to influence search results unethical unless the check has Google on it?

None of those links in the content use nofollow, in spite of many of them having Google Analytics tracking URLs on them.

And I literally spent less than 10 minutes finding the above examples & writing this article. Surely Google insiders know more about Google's internal marketing campaigns than I do. Which leads one to ask the obvious (but uncomfortable) question: why doesn't Google police themselves when they are policing others? If their algorithmic ideals are true, shouldn't they apply to Google as well?

Clearly Google takes paid links that pass pagerank seriously, as acknowledged by their repeated use of them.