Google Pricing Rumors

Jensense reports that one poorly converting site can "smart price" an entire AdSense account. The gist of it is that if you run Adsense on multiple sites, a poorly performing site in the mix can adversely affect your income from others.

The catch-22 is that you don't know you have a "bad" site, and Google doesn't want to give you separate accounts for each of your sites. So if this is true, you are really stuck: run Adsense or don't, no in-between choice.

It's unsubstantiated third party rumor, of course. But because Google tells us next to nothing, we just don't know. The overwhelming issue is Google's secrecy about everything. But really - is YPN any better? Chitika seems to be a bit more open, but neither YPN or Chitika deliver the punch that Google does for me. I understand some folks are doing very well with Chitika, but for me it's a few dollars a day at best. YPN pays well, but it's so unpredictable - some days it is great, other days it is next to nothing. Google delivers consistently - they may frustrate me because it's so hard to tell what works and what doesn't, but at the end of the day the dollars are there.

I have multiple sites, so this semi-news is disquieting. It's not disturbing, because who knows what it really means and how the heck would I know if a site wasn't converting well? That goes back to the Google secrecy problem: you'd think that they'd WANT you to do well, because that's a win-win-win: if you do well, their advertisers do well, and so do they. So if you have a weak site, you'd think Google would want to tell you for that reason alone. But they won't.

They do tell you the obvious: have good content and don't worry. But for reasons outside of your control, you could have a good site that just had lousy conversion - perhaps it accidentally attracts the wrong people due to an incorrect link somewhere, etc. You wouldn't know that you had a problem, but it could affect you. That's why I wish Google would open up just a little.

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