Google vs Madison Avenue

Google looks like it wants to own Madison Avenue. The Journal also has a free article on Google vs Madison Ave., and John Battelle recently interviewed Google's Omid Kordestani and Sergey Brin.

If you look at the SEO Bytes monthly toplist you will see that in spite of a recent major Google update many of the most popular threads are about how to monetize Google AdSense ad space.

A year or two ago few of the threads covered monetizing content. It seemed like everyone just wanted to rank or assumed nobody would share that how to profit info. AdSense and similar programs work well for quality and automated sites alike.

While Google monetizes crap sites they usually deny their connection to it, keeping the shadiness far away, funding much of it.

Ask Jeeves is a bit closer in some of their relationships. A few days ago I noticed my mom's computer had some Ask MySearch type spyware activites on it. Sure some of it may be uninstallable, but sometimes when you enter a URL in the address bar it says no site found just to redirect you to ads. Shady.

While some say one bad AdSense site may bring down the whole Google AdSense only took around an hour to approve my mom's new site for AdSense, so Google is not putting up much of a barrier to entry.

The more I read and learn about communities and click pimping the less value I see in my current business model, especially when SEO is usually framed in a negative light and I have to deal with this sort of garbage. After all, even as Case is out AOL is suddenly hot again, and some said Steve was just another spammer. :)