General

Merlene Paynter is a SxSW n00b. She’s blogging her experiences to help you out, entertain you and make you seem smarter than you are when you chill @ southby. Say thanks in the comments.

Yesterday was my first day of my first SXSW. I’d been told by the seasoned SXSW pros not schedule myself for too many things. To remain flexible and go with the flow.

My day began with an early meeting and progressed from there into lunch with a few friends, which transitioned into a Tweet-up hosted by Jeremy Wright, then on to a party thrown by the Blue Sky Factory people. After an hour or so of mingling there we headed off to the Mix at Six party – by the time we got there the party was at capacity so rather than stand around in the rain waiting to get in we decided food might be a good idea before heading to the TechSet party a little later.  A nice dinner with some friends (both old and new) then on to the TechSet party which was fun but was so packed it was hard to talk to anyone.

My lesson after Day 1 – eating is good. Every party, every lunch, every dinner – seemed to involve a lot of alcohol and not a tonne of food. I’ve now learned it’s important to eat whenever and wherever you can. And an interesting thing happens when you do go to find lunch or dinner. You always wind up finding a bunch of friends who either got to the same place first or came in just after you. If you don’t see anyone you know? Just tweet your location and how good the food or cold the beer is. You’ll be surrounded by friends in no time.

And the sessions? Rumour has it there were sessions happening yesterday but I never made it to any. When you go with the flow – you usually just flow from party to party to party. Maybe I’ll make it to a sesson or two today but I wouldn’t count on it.

This is a sponsored post brought to you by Coca-Cola Zero and IZEA. The opinions are my own.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve decided to do a promotion with IZEA. But before I jump into why this was fun, why I chose to do it and what’s in it for you (and your favourite charity!), I felt it appropriate to disclose what was received for this. Because while I would have considered writing about this anyways, and everything contained in this post is my honest opinion (feel free to call me on it if you think it isn’t!), it’s important for the audience to be able to judge objectively.

So, what was sent to me was 2 Coke mini-fridges containing Coke swag (the fridge, 2 pairs of boxers, funky coke pajamas, etc). To be honest, both the b5media crew and my family are coveting these, so I want to give them away quick! In addition, I will be receiving $500 for my part in this promotion, though roughly half of that will go to charity.

Coke Zero vs Diet Coke

As I’ve advocated multiple times in the past, drinking diet drinks is a great way to improve your lifestyle as part of weight loss (it’s a key reason I’ve lost 30 pounds in the last 4 months). Granted, eventually you want to move away from carbonated products, but even then the occasional pop sure is nice – and Diet Coke is definitely my favourite.

That said, as part of this promotion I went and bought a six-pack of Coke Zero to try it out and I have to say I actually prefer it. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Diet Coke (I prefer it to regular Coke), it just has a slightly better aftertaste.

Seeing Eye to Tongue

I first saw the new Coke Zero promotions in a movie theatre (of course) and immediately fell in love. I’ve visited iCoke.ca once or twice a month ever since, to check out the Happiness Factory movie, play the games, etc. I’ve been  very, very impressed with this series of campaigns. I’m not sure if it’s won awards or not, but it is one of the most memorable campaigns of 2008 for me.

The weird thing? I cheer for the french eye. Maybe it’s cause I’m french Canadian? Maybe it’s cause I prefer the underdog? Maybe it’s because the tongues are brutish english brawlers with no real appreciation for the culinary arts? Whatever the reason, the eye is my guy.

So when Ted informed me there was an iCoke promotion coming down the pipe, I quickly found the new dance game and threw down an easy score of 55,000 points, which put Ted to shame ;-)

Shaking What Yo Mama Gave Ya!

The new iCoke dance game is fast, easy and fun. Plus, I’ve posted the highest score I’ve seen around, a rawking 76,000 points!

Here are some pics to help you experience the iCoke Dance Hero game via the wonder of the intarwebs!

[PSGallery=1g6h8w27vu]

So Here’s Where You Come In  (prizes for you & your favourite charity!)

So there is one main prize, and one secondary prize I’m giving away. The main prize is the Coke swag mentioned above, as well as $100 that I will donate, from the IZEA cash, to your favourite charity.

In order to qualify for this prize, you can get one entry for commenting with a link to a screenshot of your score, an additional entry for blogging about this promotion and linking back and a third entry for twittering about this:

@jeremywright I spanked you at the #Coke Zero Dance Hero game with a score of [insert scorezosity]. Beat me @ http://urlbrief.com/e30708

The second prize is the second Coke swag fridge, along with $50 that I will donate to your favourite charity. The only way to qualify for this second prize is to beat my score and post your screenshot.

So What Are You Waiting For?

At least $150 is up for grabs for  your favourite charity, just for beating a dancing eyeball! And I mean, come on, if geeks can’t dance, who can?!!!

I’ll go out on a limb here and say: AdSense is a Failure.

Now before you go freaking out, let me be clear: I know it’s a multi-billion dollar business. I know it’s the anchor for all things Google. But it’s still a failure. After all, anyone who can call Microsoft/Oracle/IBM/Apple failures (and people do everyday) shouldn’t hold any illusions that “multi-billion dollar” equals “success” (or that it means “not a failure”). After all, the Zune was a billion dollar product,  and it’s arguably a failure (as was the PSP until this year).

To get into why AdSense is a failure, we need to go back to the original premise (and in many ways still the premise) of AdSense.

AdSense was designed to:

1. Provide the highest level of contextually relevant ads based on what a post is about
2. Provide value to the reader by getting rid of those “junky” ads (like spank the monkey, which is still on of my favourite ideas, even after 8 years)
3. Provide value to the advertiser by only showing ads on relevant content
4. Provide value to the advertiser by only showing ads on relevant sites
5. Driving up click through rates (CTRs) through the theory that better context = more engaged visitor interest = more clicks
6. Driving up effective CPMs thanks to higher clicks
7. Providing a “safe” ad for publishers that don’t include nudity, pornography, etc
8. Provide a “safe” ad for advertisers that didn’t SHOW on “bad” sites
9. Be transparent, so people had more data (in a more easy to use interface) than  ever before
10. Be more responsive than other ad networks (ie: serve the publishers)

Some of these are obviously different sides of the same coin and they could arguably be boiled down to: better for advertisers, better for publishers, better for google.

The problem is, none of these things happened the way they were supposed to. AdSense doesn’t actually succeed on a single one of these points – or if it does it’s for a single site, single industry, whatever. Not only is AdSense evil (for being one of the few networks that regularly violates its OWN Terms of Service without a care in the world), but it actually does the inverse of what it’s always claimed to do.

Btw, if you think any of these are over the top, listen to Google execs on the last earnings call and all the things they’re changing to bring themselves more in line with this (hint: it’ll have no impact).

Before I get into the list, let me state: I know that by posting this list I’ll get 1000 responses about why each thing is wrong for one person’s site or how it’s earning them more money or whatever. While in some ways I care (because folk earning is a Good Thing), in other ways I don’t. Why? Because if they did what they actually promised, you’d be earning even more. And advertisers would have more value. So why don’t they? Because Google wouldn’t make as much money. And while we might fool ourselves that they were once the “do no evil” company, they are now (understandably) the “lose no money” company.

Here’s the fundamental issue. If AdSense worked the way it was supposed to, advertisers would have vastly more relevance, would see much higher CPMS (and much betterpost-click activity) and cost per click would go through the roof.

Instead, AdSense is a race to the bottom for advertisers, publishers… Everyone but Google.

So let’s get to the list:

Context relevance

Stories abound about how useless AdSense targetting can be for posts. Some of these are just poor architecture (see here) others are more innocuous. But no matter what, every blogger has seen useless AdSense ads. And let me put it this way: for every useless ad you’re seeing, at least 100 visitors are seeing useless ads as well. Mention “toilet” once. Mention “cancer” once. Mention “dating” once and Google will serve up ads related to stuff that are totally random (I’m looking forward to see the ads for this post!) based on the article.

Afte all, this is called “contextual” advertising. If the “context” of an article isn’t dating, the context of a blog isn’t dating and dating has never been an actual topic before, how in the world should the add ever be dating? To flip it around: if a blog is in ever blog directory under Business, every post is about business and the post in question is about business then how do you end up with ads about mortgages? It happens. Every day. To millions of people. Those ads are actually less useful than the spank the monkey ads. At least spank the monkey ads were fun. Most of the ads that show up randomly are from spammers at best and scammers at worst.

No More Junk

The second goal with AdSense was that by having non-visual ads, you wouldn’t get the jarring experience.

But, really is this more or less jarring than a monkey flying around the screen? Especially given pornographic advertising is actually against Google’s Terms of Service? I’m sorry, but anyone who tries to convince me that Google can’t figure out an AdWords ad is about or linking to a pornographic domain would have an easier time getting Madonna onto Al Jazeera.

Of course, the irony is that there are gobs of equally spammy ads on AdSense for sites just like Money Tree, Smack the Monkey, etc, so it didn’t get rid of them. Google’s motto: “if it pays…. we’ll allow it til someone complains”.

Relevant Ads on Relevant Sites

Is this relevant? C’mon, like Google can’t scan beyond the URL?

How about ads showing up on blatantly porn sites (link is safe, links on page are not)

How about NAZI sites?

Bad ads on good sites, good ads on bad sites, bad ads on bad sites… but nowhere near enough good ads on good sites. Nevermind all the domaining going on that Google “says” they got rid of (I still see it daily).

All of these things not only pollute publisher sites, they drive down CTR for advertisers, it has them paying out ads that are completely NON contextual and drives down revenue for everyone… everyone but Google, of course.

Higher CTRs

Now, obviously, click through rates (CTRs) vary depending on site, category, content, visitor, % of SEO visits, etc. As Darren rightly points out, there are simply too many variables to do a useful “average”. However banner ad clients tend to see CTRs between .1% and 1%, with an average (based on actual data, a bunch of reports, and anecdotal evidence) of somewhere in the .25-.5% range.

So how about AdSense? Well AdSense takes the (see #9) approach of banning publishers from talking about CTR. So, I won’t talk about CTR on b5 sites, or even sites I have anything to do with. I’ll simply talk industry aggregate numbers based purely on anecdotal evidence. Evidence that says getting a 1% CTR on AdSense is pretty good for most sites (the smaller you are, the higher your CTR can  be, so if you’re doing less than 100K pageviews/month don’t tell me your CTR is higher, kthnxbai!). Anything in the .1% range woudl be low.

See a pattern? Yeah, me either since it’s actual data vs people hiding from Google smacking them down. Y’know, like #10 says they shouldn’t.

But, realistically, if folk were making more than 1%, you’d hear about it. But they aren’t, on average, outside of a few verticals or smaller sites. Unless they’re, y’know, basically making the ads as non-ad-like as possible thus fooling visitors.

So while we don’t know what AdSense’s CTR is on average, we do know it isn’t that much higher than the norm.

Higher CPMs

Now, this one’s actually harder. In theory better CTRs should mean better CPMs on AdSense (since you get paid per click, not per impression). And for some industries, it can be a much, much higher CPM than they’d see elsewhere. However, on average, all remnant (which is what AdSense is) CPMs are going down (see PubMatic’s Ad Price Index, which includes AdSense). And even if Pubmatic’s index didn’t include AdSense, if AdSense was the best out there, nobody would use services like PubMatic or Rubicon.

For the average site, AdSense delivers CPMs that are on par with banner ads.

Providing a “safe” ad for publishers that don’t include nudity, pornography, etc

Transparency / Publisher Relations

When Google started, it was on the principle that other ad networks were bad. Everything they’ve done since has been based on that. At some point, though, Google realized that the reason why customer service, data, etc, was bad at other ad networks was bad is that as the company running those relations it’s bad and expensive! So, instead of, y’know, solving the issue (since they have the $) they simply decided to ignore it.

These days, getting ahold of someone at AdSense (if you aren’t a major publisher) is effectively impossible.

Getting data out of AdSense is effectively imposible.

Even silly things like comparing CTRs is against TOS.

And then there are, of course, the thousands of stories of people who haven’t done anything wrong but have run  amock of Google’s algorithm and had their accounts cancelled. An algorithm that cancels their account largely without recourse (cause, good luck getting those emails answered with anything more than a form response!).

Conclusion

Is AdSense a big business? Definitely (which is part of the problem). Do some people earn good money with it? Definitely (but they’re only satisfied until their revenues start to drop… which they always do). Can it be fixed? Of course! Will Google fix it? Nuh uh.

Why?

The more impressions (spam sites are good for impressions), the more clicks (even accidental clicks), the more money Google makes.

By having less impressions, that’ll mean less clicks, and even a higher overall CPM as quality goes up won’t offset the hundreds of millions of dollars Google makes just off domaining.

AdSense didn’t live up to any of its actual promises, nor even its current ones, for all but a handful of people. And saying it works for 1% of people is kind of like saying the fundamentals of the economy are strong.