I enjoy exploring the mazes of Google Adsense’s labyrinthine reports and policies. Adsense has been phasing in a new reporting system, which provides a lot more information than the older system did—or at least, it provides it more accessibly. It’s full of curiosities.
Every now and again, you’ll see things in it that are truly mysterious.
One of the things they can do now is to identify the type of computer that was used to access a page. If you select “Performance Reports” and then click on “Platforms,” Google can actually tell you how many views of your site were made by people with desktops, mobile devices, etc. This amazes me (also creeps me out a bit: who needs Google spying on you in quite that much detail?).
Over the past week, for example, FaM readers viewed 563 of Funny’s pages with “high-end mobile devices.” Some of them apparently clicked on ads, since they generated a couple of bucks this week. The first time I discovered this Adsense Reports blandishment, a few people had been accessing the site through their mobile gadgets, but none of them were rising to any advertiser’s bait. Now, though, apparently some of them are biting.
Meanwhile, 5,005 pages were viewed from desktops. Unclear whether a “high-end mobile device” can be a laptop, or whether “desktop” = a big clunker on your desk or something like a MacBook, which today has more power and speed than my immobile iMac.
Equally unclear what is meant by “unmatched ad requests,” a line that appears on the “Platform” page. Whatever it is, it can’t be very significant: it always registers “0.”
Adsense kindly includes a sort of glossary with its reports page—it’s really an agglomeration of FAQs, I think. Look up “unmatched ad request” and you get the answer to some customer’s question about why this item appears in his reports:
An ad request is counted each time your site requests an ad to be served, even if no ad is returned. Unless your coverage is 100%, you will have more ad requests than matched requests (ads that are returned and displayed on your site), resulting in some unmatched requests.
Some reports have columns that are meaningful only for matched requests. For example, the Targeting type report shows how ads displayed on your site have been targeted. When an ad request is unmatched, there are no ads to consider, so the request has no targeting type. This is why unmatched requests appear in a separate row.
Uhm…yeah. Doesn’t that just clear everything up for you?
Oh well.
Moving on, the Biggest Mystery of Adsense—at least for my feeble little brain—is why some days and some weeks vast lucre (oh, say, $1.95 a day!) comes pouring in, and at other times pay is in pennies. The past two or three weeks, FaM has been cranking more pennies than usual (??? in the dead of summer when readers should be vacationing at the beach?????). But last month it didn’t earn enough to get Adsense off its duff to send a payment. I can’t for the life of me figure out what I’m doing (if I’m doing anything) to cause Adsense revenues to increase in some weeks and flatten out in others.
It does seem as though spikes in revenues may increase when you discuss certain topics. For example, the current increase seems to have occurred around the time I was holding forth about credit cards. A bunch of ads for banks, credit cards, loan sharks, and the like came up (at least, they did on my computer—apparently these things are tailored according to what Google can see of your browsing habits as it spies on you). Maybe ads from well-heeled institutions pay better…i.e., maybe Google charges ING more than it charges some local air-conditioning or pool company and then passes a few pennies of the profit along to the site publisher???
LOL! That would explain why some bloggers create whole sites devoted to nothing but discussing credit cards. 😀 Boooooring, but profitable.
Adsense has performed moderately well over the past week. Not well enough to retire to the Côte d’Azur, by any means, but well enough that if I could be certain it would behave this way all the time, the S-corporation that receives the vast lucre could afford to buy me a cell phone.
{sigh} But I’m afraid it’s just like adjunct teaching: catch as catch can.
Well. Bloggers who run adsare small businesses, of course. A couple of ripples in the daily flow of things have, over the past couple of days, led me to ruminate about integrity and ethics, and about how they should direct the course of our little side businesses, including our blogs.
First, a very nice new client recently wandered in through the door. Says he wants someone to edit website copy for a successful small business in the trades. I send my rate sheet, which frames my rates on a per-page basis. He wants to know what I’ll charge by the hour. I say sixty bucks, not an unreasonable amount in the large scheme of things (twenty years ago a friend here was getting $120 an hour for similar work). He, doing business in a large city far, far away where employees’ and independent contractors’ pay is not throttled by right-to-work laws, doesn’t even blink.
So I dive into the project, which is kind of fun. Well, “kind of fun” because it doesn’t entail a lot of technical language or esoteric theory, unlike most of the stuff I do. Mathematical biosciences this is not, nor is it abstruse postmodernist blather. But there’s a fair amount of it, and it needs substantial reorganization, rewriting, and new research & writing. I enjoy this little endeavor over the course of about 22 hours. Eventually I wrap the job and add up my bill, and…
Holy mackerel! At $60 an hour, the tab came to enough for me to buy a condo in the guy’s expensive city. It really did seem out of line, given the relative ease and mild entertainment value of the work.
Okay, it’s true that if I based my fees on how much fun the job is, I’d have to edit Poisoned Pen Press copy for free. But still…there’s a limit.
Seeking a fairer arrangement, I calculated what it would cost the client if I charged my highest page rate—justifiable, I figured, because of the amount of actual writing I did—and came up with an amount that was enough for The Copyeditor’s Desk to buy itself a couple of printer cartridges. Fairly respectable, actually, but not enough to break the bank.
So that was what I ended up billing: about four or five hundred bucks less than the hourly rate would have commanded. But at $60 an hour, the bottom line added up to a figure utterly beyond reason. In an abstract way, it didn’t seem right to charge that much for that kind of work.
Call it the Sanity Discount.
Hard on the heels of that exchange, an ongoing conundrum resurfaced. Some of you probably noticed the recent “sp0ns0r3d post” that went up recently. You may or may not have observed that it also went down.
Funny about Money is getting large enough to attract the attention of various individuals and groups who bill themselves as advertisers. Almost all of them—a good 99.9 percent of them—want me to run paid text links. And they’re willing to pay pretty well for the privilege. I could easily double or triple Funny’s revenues by selling paid text links.
These people and their brokers approach the blogger by saying either that they want to buy ad space on the site or that they are generously offering a guest post, “absolutely free to you.”
Trouble is, doing so eventually puts one afoul of Google’s arcane rules, designed to protect its search engine algorithm. To simplify a complicated story, if Google catches you publishing paid text links (which sooner or later it will), your page rank magically drops to zero.
So, after you’ve worked for months or years to build a respectable page rank, these folks come along and take advantage of it; then when their practices kill your page rank, they of course will abandon you.
That particular aspect is not at issue here, though. What we have at issue is the so-called advertiser’s strategy to evade discovery, which is to produce copy for a post that fits the blogger’s site theme. The paid link is then embedded in the post, in such a way that the link appears to point to something relevant to the post’s subject.
It’s important to understand that paid links are not advertising. They’re a device to suck link juice from a site with a relatively decent page rank into the buyer’s own site, by way of making the other site appear at or near the top of a Google search.
In other words, what looks like a real post is a deceptive device to mount self-serving links whose purpose has nothing to do with the host site’s content. Often it contains a link pointing to some outfit selling a service or product that runs counter to the host site’s very raison d’être. Why, for example, would a personal finance blogger who urges readers to get out of debt, manage money wisely, and avoid loan sharks recommend taking out a payday loan?
Why? To collect a hundred bucks for publishing two words attached to a live do-follow link, that’s why.
Such a post is, in short, advertorial. Actually, it doesn’t even rise to that level, because the articles are not really intended to be read; they exist to carry the links, which exist to use the host’s page rank to jack up the search engine page rank on the link seller’s site. While they’re billed as advertising, they’re actually a form of black-hat SEO.
Well, I started in journalism back in 1979, and over the years I’ve worked for some of the most prominent regional periodicals in my part of the country. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as journalistic ethics, and over the course of 32 years they tend to inhabit your thinking. When I came up, there was a sharp divide between advertising and editorial—in fact, the ad and circulation departments were housed on the other side of the building from where the editors and artists worked.
Magazines did publish crass little “articles” written by highly paid writers—earning far more than any of us did!—whose purpose was to plug paying advertisers. This was to be expected: magazines survive on ad revenue; subscription income does not suffice to support a print publication. However, ethical publishers mark advertorials as such: with a running header or footer saying something like “Advertisement.” Often advertorials are set off typographically and even printed on slightly different paper from the rest of the rag.
To publish advertising or SEO masquerading as an article without cluing the reader to the fact that the stuff is paid advertising is dishonest.
It is to lie.
That is why many publications do not print advertorial at all, and why those who do, if they have any decency at all, label them prominently as advertising.
Times have changed, of course, with the advent of the brave new world that is the Internet. And blogging is and is not journalism, though it has readers who presumably expect some standard of honesty from their writers. Here’s what journalistic webmaster Robert Niles says about the issue, writing at the Online Journalism Review:
The old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.
The new rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.
Accordingly, I marked the paid-link peddler’s copy as a Sp0nsor3d Post!
This elicited a squawk of dismay. When I refused to remove the notice saying the post was a paid article containing links to the author’s clients’ sites, the deal fell through. Cheerfully, I removed the post from my site, and good riddance to it.
To cope with the practice of secreting paid links in fake stories, Google is now demanding that all links to commercial sites be coded as no-follow links. The would-be advertisers hate this, of course—because the link juice is what they’re paying for—and usually they will decline to place a paid link unless it’s do-follow. Many bloggers simply take a chance that Google will never catch them, and they justify the potential loss of page rank by arguing that PR doesn’t matter anyway.
Maybe it doesn’t, maybe it does. The technicalities of page rank are way above my pretty little head, and so I don’t trouble myself with them.
But one could argue, with some justice, that Google’s policy on paid do-follow links is hugely unfair, since Google Adsense places plenty of paid links on your site. And since Google pays nothing like what these often rather sleazy “advertisers” will pay, Google itself takes on a whiff of the exploitive.
About that, I say it is what it is.
Ironically, while Google’s policy is self-serving (their motive has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with the way the company’s business model works), it in fact feeds into that fundamental journalistic ethic: the effect of the rule is to discourage deceptive content and to encourage separation of advertising and editorial.
Old-fashioned…but then so is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Okay, folks. This is it. I’ve found it! THE premier Funny about Money giveaway. A souvenir to remember. And Funny is offering it up to one lucky reader!
Are you ready for this? Well, brace yourself…
HERE IT IS!
Yes! A good 110 carats of genuine highest-quality rhinestones arranged in a superb designer setting of finest top-grade ebony plastic framing the world-class blue-gray smoked plastic sunglasses lenses. Perfect for your summer parties!
Does anything say FUNNY ABOUT MONEY better than this?
O.M.G., it practically shouts “Money”! Or maybe “Funny”… 😉
La Maya and I came across it on our latest estate sale adventure, at a wildly upscale house in Paradise Valley. Possibly “wild” was the operative term with this couple, who are divorcing and selling the marital furniture. The house was very elegant, and they had some lovely things. And…those. Since everything else was impeccably tasteful, we can only assume this artifact is itself impeccably tasteful.
So. Obviously, any self-respecting Funny about Money fan needs a unique pair of sunglasses adorned with solid rhinestone dollar signs. And one lucky person will have them, free! Here’s the plan:
Get your name entered in the giveaway with any or all of these strategies:
♦ Subscribe to Funny about Money by RSS feed or by e-mail.
♦ Click on any of the icons below to share this post.
♦ Blog about Funny’s first giveaway on your site—link to this post, and feel free to copy and reproduce the extraordinary image above of the Official Funny about Money Rhinestone Shades.
♦ Leave a comment to this post, below, explaining where you will wear the gorgeous Official Funny about Money Rhinestone Shades.
To claim your chances to score this outstanding prize, be sure to post a SEPARATE comment to report each of these maneuvers you accomplish.
Deadline is 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, Monday, May 23, 2011.
The iMac’s wireless rodent ran out of gas the other day, and I didn’t have any AA batteries laying around the house. Instead of running forthwith down to the corner store to buy new batteries, I made a deliberate decision to leave the computer off.
This is something I need to do every day: leave the computer off. Maybe more of us need to do that.
Don’t know about you, but I spend way, way too much time in front of computer monitors, to the detriment of health, social life, and the general sanitation of my home. So mesmerizing is this thing that whenever I sit down in front of a computer—doesn’t much matter what for—I go into a kind of hypnotic state, losing track of the time and losing track of conscious existence. I don’t hear what’s going on around me and I don’t think about what’s going on around me. That’s how I came to destroy not one but two expensive pieces of cookware (and have on occasion been damned lucky not to set fire to the kitchen). I depend on the Internet for news, encyclopedia information, medical advice, teaching tools, social interaction…and it has expanded to take over my life.
Like the Borg, it has assimilated me.
Between this phenomenon and the fact that the rib injury has hurt so much I could hardly move, by last Friday my house had come to rival a pigsty in its spectacular filth. All 1860 square feet of tile floors felt gritty underfoot. The kitchen floor was getting sticky as well as unsightly. The stovetop was encrusted with grease. The kitchen and bathrooms hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Outdoors, plants were dying for lack of water, the garden had gone to seed, suckers were growing like green scrub-brush bristles all over the desert willow and the yellow oleander. Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s in-line leaf-catcher was so stuffed with debris the system was dying of entropy. And on Thursday a fellow member of our business group, showing off his brand-new iPad, snapped a photo of us all: I was sitting there with my head thrust forward and a dopey look on my face, just as I must look while parked in front of a computer monitor.
This. has. got. to. stop.
Friday’s post was written on Thursday night. So, on Friday when the iMac went incommunicado, instead of rescuing it, I pulled the suckers off the desert willow and then spent the entire day cleaning house. Did the laundry; washed the sheets; changed the bed. So far behind on these chores was I that catching up required an entire day.
That evening I used the MacBook to view current episodes of Rachel Maddow and The Daily Show, during which time I soaked, oiled and manicured my skaggy, neglected toenails and fingernails. Saturday: cleaned and vacuumed the filthy car, cleaned out the garage, read assignments from the online students. Rode my bike around the neighborhood. Sunday: cleaned out the pool equipment, scrubbed down the grease-soaked barbecue, pulled the dead and dying plants out of the garden, started to trim some of the frosted branches off the cape honeysuckle and the bougainvillea, rode my bike into a different neighborhood and along a stretch of canal bank. Ironed four weeks’ worth of jeans and shirts. Watched last week’s episode of PBS’s Masterpiece on the MacBook and this week’s off the air, again manicuring the exhausted fingernails with shea butter.
A weekend away from the computer left me feeling…well, I was left with quite a few thoughts.
• I need to limit the time I spend in front of the computer. • I’ve got to keep up with housework, yardwork, and basic personal grooming. • I need to get a social life. • I need to get more exercise. • I must re-evaluate why I am writing this blog and whether I should continue writing it at all.
While all this was going on, a flurry of anguished e-mails hit the message board of the blogger’s group I belong to. One of our members was undergoing a similar crisis of confidence. She reported that she had run out of ideas for posts, and that…yes! She was simply spending too much time in a trance-like state in front of the computer monitor!
She was expressing exactly what had been going through my own mind.
Why blog at all? Why did I start blogging, and how did FaM morph from an obscure diary to…to whatever the hell it is?
When I was a teenaged girl, I started writing a daily journal. That’s how I became a fairly skilled writer: practice makes perfect. On and off over the past 50 years, I’ve written something almost every day.
Four or five years ago, wearied of constant virus hassles and endless Microsoft patching and updates, I bought a Macintosh. A program called iLife came with the Mac. Among other things, this program makes it possible for users to write blogs and store them in Apple’s cloudlike server space, now dubbed ME.com. When I found this after I bought the iMac, it occurred to me that instead of filling up notebook after notebook, I could write journal entries digitally.
Too, I’d heard of “blogs” and wondered if I could write one. Somehow I’d stumbled across Trent Hamm’s The Simple Dollar, and so (monkey see, monkey do!) I decided to try my hand at a personal finance blog—heavier on the personal than on the finance. It really never occurred to me that anyone would read it. Nor did I especially intend for anyone to read it, any more than I intended for anyone to read my daily journals.
The iLife system is pretty limited. Its blog function apparently was intended for people who want to post photos of the kids for the grandparents to view, and not for serious blogging. This was fine by me, because at the outset it was strictly a hobby. And so I was astonished to discover that somewhere out there, people actually were reading my maunderings.
Belatedly, I moved FaM to WordPress.com. There it remained pretty much an idle hobby, but because of WordPress’s broad functionality, the blog grew in reach and readership. I continued to write every day, only because that’s what I do. But over time I began to craft posts more carefully and to try to focus the blog more specifically on PF how-to’s and advice.
At the urging of new blogging friends, I decided to move FaM to Bluehost so I could monetize it. This occurred with the help of Mrs. Micah, who at the time was running BlogCrafted, the website consultancy she had started. FaM soon started to earn money. Not much, but something.
This development changed the drift of what I was writing, because of course it changed the enterprise’s underlying mission. Instead of writing for the hell of writing—a kind of busman’s holiday—now I was again writing for pay. This meant I had to focus more sharply on personal finance issues and try (at least on occasion) to write for the widest possible readership. And I also had to spend a lot more time on SEO and various efforts to publicize the blog.
Doing anything for money tends to sap the fun out of it. Instead of entertainment, it morphs into a job. Now I was spending one to three hours a day (often more than that) at work: on top of a real paying job and on top of trying to run a side business. True, the blog also served as a podium from which to vent about that paying job and about my blessedly former employer, the Great Desert University. But still, blogging had become a job.
Today FaM has almost 500 subscribers, plus an unknown number who, like me, do not subscribe to blogs but manually revisit a specific set of favorites. It averages about 14,760 unique visits a month. So far this year it’s already had over 1.3 million hits. People all over the planet are reading this thing. As one-man bands go, it seems to be moderately successful.
With this small success has come a steady flow of “offers” from would-be advertisers. Most of them—a good 99.99% of them—are pretty sleazy: payday loan operators and loan consolidators. Many of them do not try to do business with me directly, but instead hire wannabe freelance writers, who seem to be ignorant of the implications of what they’re doing, to offer me FREE! guest posts laced with paid links. Others wish to pay me to write posts similarly laced with said paid links.
Paid text links violate Google’s terms of service. They put a site at risk of losing its page rank, the very quality that makes advertisers wish to place paid links on your site. You can get around this risk by entering code that makes their links “no-follow” links, which, as I understand it, tells search engines to ignore them. This conflicts with the text-link peddler’s motive, and so most of the time when you tell them you’ll publish only no-follow links, they back off.
I’m sure FaM could make a lot of money selling space to these shady operators. Briefly. As soon as Google knocked out my page rank, however, the text-link crowd would move to some other sucker’s site, and FaM’s AdSense income would tank.
Practicalities aside, fake “guest posts” whose sole purpose is to plant advertisements masquerading as helpful links are unethical. They misrepresent themselves and your blog to your readers. Like print advertorials, they pretend to be something they are not.
So, I made a conscious decision not to sell space for paid text links, and never to accept guest posts from people I don’t know or to run do-follow links to any commercial sites. This includes all the Amazon Associate ads that run on FaM: they all have been converted to no-follow links.
I seriously considered demonetizing Funny altogether. Adsense clutters up the site, makes it look junky. And it doesn’t earn much: despite continuing growth in traffic, revenues have dropped from around $200 to about $150 a month. On the other hand, it does supplement revenues from editing, and over the course of a year accrues enough to buy, say, a new iMac. So I’ve decided to leave Adsense in place for the nonce. If our proposed new client materializes this summer and actually pays enough to matter, I’ll revisit that decision.
So. Given that the site never will earn enough to substitute for a day job, I need to decide what to do to bring the endless time consumption under control. Here’s how I think I should start:
• First, quit posting every day. Cut the number of published posts from seven a week to three or four. At the very least, never post on weekends, when readership drops drastically.
• Next, do not write the first thing in the morning. Instead, take the dog for a walk and then launch into normal human activities. Write posts in the evening, after more useful pursuits have been accomplished.
• Mine student papers for guest posts. Each assignment elicits several interesting, well written pieces from the feature writing students. At the end of each semester, assess these and ask the best writers if they would like to publish one or more articles on FaM.
• Stop submitting posts to blog carnivals every single week. This is time-consuming, and, because I enter any damnfool thing instead of limiting submissions to the best pieces, not very productive.
• Quit writing the “Moments of Fame” series. It is time-consuming to plow through three or four carnivals a week looking for the posts that might interest FaM readers and then writing blurbs for each of them. Instead, post a tag in each accepted submission, linking from that post directly back to the carnival that featured it.
• Remove the Alexa toolbar from Firefox and never think about it again.
• Revisit the advertising question later, after this scheme has a chance to create some breathing space. Then consider other ways to monetize FaM…or whether to demonetize it altogether.
Tomorrow—assuming I post tomorrow—Funny’s 1,500th post will go live. If not tomorrow, this certainly will happen sometime in the next few days. It’s a milepost! A good time to rethink.
Thank goodness there’ll be a break of almost a month between the end of spring semester and the start of summer session!
Hey! Donna Freedman e-mailed to say Funny won Surviving and Thriving’s giveaway of Personal Finance: The Missing Manual! w00t! That’s one of the few PF books I’d actually like to read. Not only that, but she’s throwing in a fine moose calendar, to boot.
And O.K., God. Thanks (i guess) for the pittance Funny about Money earns off Adsense. It’s…better than a hit in the head, at any rate.
But it is a pittance.
Just finished putting together a presentation for the business group in which I intend to propose that my new Scottsdale business friends advertise on Funny about Money.
The site has pretty respectable traffic—14,200 unique visits a month, 3.2 million hits a year add up to a whole lot of eyeballs on ads. In theory, many more eyes hit the virtual pages of Funny about Money in a month than ever see the pages of, say, Phoenix magazine. Since ad rates for websites are so low compared to print media with similar demographics, a business owner gets a heckuva buy for his or her advertising dollar.
My goal is to sell enough ads to double Funny’s revenues this year. The plan is to push AdSense below the fold and to use the prime real estate for customers who are willing to pay something more than 30 cents a day. I’ll keep AdSense (though may knock out some of its ad blocks), but downplay it in favor of ads that make a more reliable and fair return.
Since AdSense pays precious little, doubling FaM’s revenues will not be very hard.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether a living, breathing business executive can be persuaded to spend even precious little to see his company’s name in glowing characters on a computer screen. Most of these folks are older and not very techie. However, almost all of them sell services that would interest FaM readers: financial products and management, travel and resort services, healthcare, and the like.
It’ll be interesting to see if I get anywhere with this! 😉
