[HN Gopher] Google adsense is transitioning to per-impression pa...
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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.
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