Pimpin' My Blog
February 25 / 9PM
After nearly a decade of everyone else making the big bucks online, I decided it was high time to start putting Google's AdSense to work for me. That's right - I'm pimpin' my blog (I'm already ahead $0.29!). Only a single block of text ads and only on my individual entry pages. The idea of my site looking like a half-ad, online CNN article scares the bajesus out of me.
I'm fascinated by how GA works and how, in the past couple of years alone, it has spawned a massive cottage industry of folks who profit almost exclusively from users clicking away from their sites.
I'm equally as fascinated by the black hat counter-cottage industry, known as "click fraud" - proving once again that if there's a way to make a quick buck, people can and will take advantage. Wired covered the story last month (see How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet - Pay-per-click advertising is big, big, big business. So are bogus hits on Internet ads. It's search giants against scam artists in an arms race that could crash the entire online economy.).
The PPC industry is still in its infancy, with Yahoo! and MSN pulling a distant second and third place to Google's runaway lead. But that gap is closing. And that only means higher demand, increased ad space availability, and even more fraudulent clickers. It'll be interesting in the coming months and years to see how the entire dance plays out. Will the doom and gloom prophecies of Wired come true (they usually do)? Or will PPC providers cease providing PPC altogether?
Stay tuned ...
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