Degradation of the web

The motivation to earn money is a powerful one indeed.  Money is like oxygen in that you need it to survive.  So just like a creature that is gasping for air, some will do anything to get another breath of money, sometimes desperately and often without regard to the consequences.   There are many ways to earn money but they ultimately fall into two categories:  ones that contribute to society and ones that don't.  In this society, it is very difficult to do something that has no effect.  If one is not contributing to society, it is safe guess that one is parasitic to it.

I encountered this second condition recently when I tried to legitimately get a domain name for a small business.  The domain I was interested in had expired and was set to be released to the public.  I back-ordered the domain through godaddy; unfortunately, someone else did the same and they were the ones that got it.   Anyway, the domain was owned by a jewelry store and it operated a site for some time.  I don't know what happened, only that it was no longer operating and the opportunity to get this domain appeared.  So I signed up for godaddy's backorder service and while I think godaddy is a fine organization, don't use them to snag expiring domains.  It is not their specialty and they essentially get money up front with no guarantee of success and they don't try hard enough.  Of course if they are unsuccessful, you can use the credit for another domain until they are successful in getting one.

If the person or organization that scored the domain name actually was a  jewelry store selling jewelry on line, it would at least have gone to a good use.  But I have discovered that the other party is using it solely for content ads.  What are these ads?  Well they are the graffiti of the web.  These are sites that only have clickable links that take you to other parts of the web, and in the process do three things:

1. Earn money for the site holder when an ad is clicked
2. Drain the ad budget of the advertiser
3. Earn revenue for Google (or any of the other content providers)

Of course there are other latent effects.  Consider this one:  rob a legitimate business of a good domain name for their business.  Here's another one: make the web less pleasant for the billion people using it by having to come across web graffiti.  I wonder how many man hours, globally, are used up in the process.  Yea, it's only a second or two and then you get out of the site.  But multiply that by the billions and you are talking about some serious time that has been taken out of people's lives.

You've all seen these content sites - the graffiti of the web.  You find these sites, replete with content ads and little or no content, that are there for the sole purpose of generating money for the site holder and to drain the advertising dollars from the advertiser, who generally has little knowledge of how this works.  It is sickening.  I saw my google advertising costs quadruple with no return.  I turned of the adsense (content) ads, and lo and behold, by google charges dropped by 75% and yet my income was unaffected.  So the net result:  I was paying google a lot of money for nothing.

I have another client that has a colleague that has purchased, according to him, some $300,000 in domain names for this very purpose.   The problem with this practice is it delivers no value to the marketplace.  Very few of these clicks are legitimate, in my estimation, or at least from my own experience.  With this business model, click fraud is rampant.  One can out source to click farm outfits where ads are clicked all day long. 

Google is in a precarious position.  The more fraud, the more revenue the earn.  The more fraud, the worse their reputation becomes.  Its reputation has already suffered yet google says to the advertiser you should just let it happen.  My own take on it is this is just pure googlese.

My solution is educate fellow business people that have PPC ads that you may be enriching google by allowing this practice.  The more this becomes common knowledge, and it will take some time, the less you'll see of these worthless ads and graffiti pollution will decrease.   So for educational purposes, read here about what advertisers are saying.  And a great article on this phenomenon is entitled Something Rotten in Adsense.

We've seen changes in the web.  Remember pop-up ads?  They are almost a thing of the past.  Let's educate our fellow advertisters and bury content ads once and for all.