[HN Gopher] Google adsense is transitioning to per-impression pa... ___________________________________________________________________ Google adsense is transitioning to per-impression payments for publishers Author : maoro Score : 97 points Date : 2023-11-02 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (blog.google) (TXT) w3m dump (blog.google) | djyaz1200 wrote: | Didn'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... | jshen wrote: | enshitification | | This also means there is a huge opportunity to disrupt google | at this pont. | | edit to add reference: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification | candiddevmike wrote: | How do you disrupt a monopoly? | ipaddr wrote: | One feature at a time | jshen wrote: | I 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 wrote: | There is a some amount of friction because browsers | default to it and user inertia from using it for decades. | AuthError wrote: | 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)) | aaronbrethorst wrote: | lol, 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 wrote: | Over aggressive adblocker or custom rule? | aaronbrethorst wrote: | Over-aggressive ad blocker. | Macha wrote: | I mean, this is the fault of your content blocker being | overeager, probably with a *adsense* or *ad* rule in there | somewhere | pests wrote: | I 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 wrote: | > to the display industry standard of paying per impression | | Huh, who sets the industry standard? Google, google, google and | google. | bragr wrote: | There 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 wrote: | *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 wrote: | The CPM will still factor in click through rates, so it's just a | different way of tabulating the same numbers. | riku_iki wrote: | The worry is that Google will game auctions and pocket the | difference. | h1fra wrote: | Wasn'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 wrote: | I 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. | toast0 wrote: | I 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 wrote: | CPA 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) | toast0 wrote: | The big issue with CPA is attribution. It's one thing if | you see the ad, click through, and make a booking in a | single session. That's easy to attribute, if all the | parties involved trust each other to do the tracking. | (Parties include the advertiser, the publisher, the ad | network(s), maybe even the advertising agency) | | But what if you clicked through the ad, and then close the | window, but later come back and book through the advertised | site? Now we also need to have come to an agreement about | 'lookback window'. Maybe a fair lookback window is | different for different markets. | | But it gets worse. What if you clicked through the ad on | your phone, and then booked on your desktop? No tracking. | Or even worse, what if it's a brand ad, and you come into | the physical store and buy? Definitely no tracking. (well, | some people try to get tracking for that, but it's pretty | iffy) | DudeOpotomus wrote: | No it wasn't but with a CPM you can actually optimize the ads | for better results since the click is the only real measure of | successful ad placement. Everything else happens after a click, | so getting to the click is the most important target. | | As for %. They're bringing the customer, providing the tool, | the payments and the collection of the money. All the publisher | is doing is placing some code on their site. So 32% is actually | a lot cheaper than a publisher hiring their own sales staff, | buying their own ad servers, collecting and sorting the | payment. | | Just so you know. | throwaway20222 wrote: | I wonder if it would be cheaper if there were more | competitors to google in the market than there are currently. | | There are many things that I could outsource that would be | cheaper than doing myself (build/buy a car. Buy a | cheeseburger as opposed to producing all the ingredients | myself.) I am equally interested in what that 32% fee would | look like in a more open market and then say if it is cheap | or expensive. | jsnell wrote: | Isn't that exactly what this is addressing? | | This is splitting up AdSense such that any third-party buy- | side operation that wants to use AdSense as the network is | on equal footing with Google's own buy-side using AdSense. | If anyone else can run that side of the equation better or | for cheaper, they can now do so. | DudeOpotomus wrote: | There are and have always been lots and lots of options. | It's up to the publisher to decide who they work with. But | with the scale that Google holds, it's hard to compete with | their money as they own the market and have a black box | monopoly - there is no way to know what the actual floor of | the bid is for instance, its set by Google, arbitrarily. | | In other words: They say it costs $5 per click or $25 CPM, | they just make that figure up. There is no real market | driving that cost. It's 100% made up to maximize Google's | profits. | t0mas88 wrote: | A lot of ads aren't about a click and direct transaction. | FMCG brands run ads just to increase brand exposure all the | time, there is no e-commerce environment to buy a can of beer | or a tube of toothpaste after the click. | lisper wrote: | AdWords launched as CPM. | | Source: I was the lead engineer on the first release of | AdWords. | crowcroft wrote: | The 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 wrote: | If 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 wrote: | Is 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 wrote: | If 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 wrote: | Not 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. | pests wrote: | I am really curious about the long term result of the Google | and DoubleClick merger. I saw a commentor here a few weeks ago | calling it a "reverse-takeover" of Google by DoubleClick. I was | around and remember that era fondly so just wondering what was | going on behind the scenes and what long-term effects it had. | josephjrobison wrote: | Another tweak to the infinite money glitch | josefresco wrote: | So, 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 wrote: | Regulators 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 wrote: | How 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 | JohnMakin wrote: | > 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. | _rrnv wrote: | Happened 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 wrote: | I 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 wrote: | They 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 wrote: | There 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. | pie420 wrote: | Don't be evil. | | Funny how even you don't really remember it | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil | pixl97 wrote: | Don't be [caught doing] evil. | | Someone just paraphrased that in the company memo. | olliej wrote: | Yeah it's not been a thing a google for at least a | decade. When I went to work for them the onboarding did | not have that phrase anywhere in any of the documents | (onboarding, training, or orientation) - and I explicitly | searched for it. | SquareWheel wrote: | They didn't ask you to read the Code of Conduct? It's | been in there from the beginning. | | https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/ | plagiarist wrote: | I'd go to small claims over $5k. | conradfr wrote: | It happened to me for no good reasons in 2008. | | Nowadays I have a side projects with Adsense on it, using | another Google account, which I have to use in incognito mode | because otherwise it links me to the other account that I'm | still using and rejects me. | | Also, for a service that processes billions, it still does not | offer a developer mode so when your implementing the ad script: | | - You're not always getting ads so can't be really be sure your | code and UI are OK. | | - You risk being penalized / kicked out because you click on an | ad n times by mistake | | Edit: also there's a semi-scam that has been running on Adsense | for years. Those "3 steps to get your video/software/etc click | here" ads. There is a lot of variant. | | IIRC they trick people into subscribing to a fake service | through your phone bill. | | They're very hard to block as a publisher as they come from A | LOT of accounts. | _jal wrote: | Yeah, 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. | tedivm wrote: | This happened to me when I was in college and cost me a few | hundred dollars. It caused so much stress, and no human was | willing or able to help me. As far as I'm concerned Google | robbed me. | jacobn wrote: | Small claims court? May be too late now of course. | dumbfounder wrote: | They have several thousand of my dollars. Every several years I | get a notice from an auditor that I have money and I just need | to login and get it. Except I can't login, and I can't get it. | jdalgetty wrote: | I think this a way for them to pay small publishers less. | GoRudy wrote: | Google'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. | wyncent wrote: | If Google will pay per view, what incentive will Google have to | personalize ads? | thornewolf wrote: | google 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 | varispeed wrote: | I just hope EU gets properly onto this racket and forces Google | to close Adsense. | londons_explore wrote: | Per 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 wrote: | Doesn't the price per impression still get adjusted based on | performance? | londons_explore wrote: | Yes, 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. | ss64 wrote: | I 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 wrote: | Yes, this seems to be a thing: https://adnauseam.io/ | colesantiago wrote: | Why can't Google transition to shut down Adsense, Google | Analytics and the rest of their other products? | | Everything they announce goes to their biggest product the Google | graveyard, so Google might as well send it all over there to | spare us more with their destruction of the web. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-02 23:00 UTC)