Stuck in Google’s Doghouse? Solution: mail DoJ

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/technology/13nocera.html?pagewanted=all

by jacobscott • 18 years ago

48 26 18 years ago

staunch• 18 years ago

I've read too many stories about ad arbitrage and the massive amounts of money these guys make. It seems just a few notches above email spam, but damn if $155k/mo profit isn't tempting. I can't see myself working so hard to pollute the internet, even if there is good money in it. I'd rather spend my time creating things of genuine value.

davidw3• 18 years ago

+1: it's frustrating to try and build cool stuff, and see people raking in the dough with junk like this. I don't really feel sorry for them when Google comes along and dumps them, as they weren't really making anything people wanted.

petercooper6• 18 years ago

No. If they were doing something "no-one wants", they'd be making no money - a bit like if I tried selling ice to the eskimos.

People were clicking on his Adwords ads (which would have to be properly descriptive - due to Google's policies) out of choice and were then browsing the guy's site before some of them were clicking on Adsense ads (again, properly described and out of choice).

If someone didn't like the sound of an ad, why would they click on it? They were clicking on the ads, and short of being forced at gunpoint, they obviously "wanted" to click on them.

bkj123• 18 years ago

@davidw - I bet you get value - enjoyment/quality of life, not money - by building "cool stuff" that's useful. Why not use this along with your frustration to offer something so much better than sourcetool.com? Take their general approach and make it sooooo much better.... identify who users are and what they want or just build it b/c it helps you. Things like ... - better interface for their search (take their search tips and put an intuitive interface on it) - revenue model of ads for specific listings. For example, listing Z pays $x to display a banner add everytime someone searches for "ball bearings" on the site. We'll call it the "<your domain name> words" programs (ala AdWords). - drive revenue to the site through multiple means like using Google Adwords, ads in industry magazines/websites, word of mouth, blogging - offer other features like customers join to have emails sent to them whenever new listings appear based on certain search terms. Then you start building a customer base of which you can analyze what are they want (e.g. ball bearings) and who they are (work at a manufacturer with $T in sales). And then you tell all the ball bearing listing that "hey we have X people interested in ball bearing, don't you want to pay $$$ for a banner ad?

oh my gravy, i have to stop.... i'm so excited and typing so fast I can barely breath

dhimes• 18 years ago

Agreed, but Google should at least be willing to be specific about its requirements.

They should also be willing and able to tell you whether or not you paid for a particular click in your logs. I have had difficulty getting that information from them.

petercooper6• 18 years ago

The problem with being open with their mostly algorithm driven systems is that it'd allow people to find loopholes and game the system.

People currently do this, but it's very unpredictable due to lack of information. With information, some advertisers would be more informed than others and have an advantage - this is not what Google wants because informed advertisers spend less and I suspect Google would rather have uninformed "stupid" advertisers wasting $1000s per month propping up their business.

petercooper6• 18 years ago

He wasn't polluting the Internet any more than Google are. He was running a directory of companies. Having a directory organized for a specific industry can be extremely useful, compared to the myriad of results you'd get on Google.

If his site had no "value" then how was it creating $155k/mo of profit? Out of thin air? By browsers forced at gunpoint to click on ads? It had value.

lacker• 18 years ago

Take a look at the site yourself and ask if this is the sort of page you want to end up on.

http://timepieces.sourcetool.com/index.php?s=0&l=2&c...

Looks like a spam directory to me.

emmett2• 18 years ago

It seems like you're making the argument that any company that turns a profit must by definition be creating value. But it's possible to turn a profit by all kinds of destructive means (fraud, externalized costs, etc.)

In particular in this case, the issue is not that the ads had 0 value themselves. Obviously, as you point out, his sites had some value. However, that value is clearly less than that of actually relevant search results (or so Google, the worlds foremost authority on search results, believes). Therefore the profit comes from externalizing the costs, rather than from value creation.

josefresco2• 18 years ago

Excellent article exposing what most people who do business with Google already know. Search arbitrage or not, Google is in a position to force out anyone they are not 'partners' with.

This case isn't nearly as bad as many arbitrage cases out there, and I would argue that even true arbitrage is healthy for the market, identifying and exploiting inefficiencies in the ad market and correcting them (and who's to say you can't make some money doing that?)

Example of 'helpful/legit' arbitrage: you buy from AdWords the keyword "mortgage" and then geo target your ads to only customers in California, sending them to a page with AdSense ads for the keyword "California mortgage" which pays higher than the national/non geo-specific term.

The problem with this is Google wants both the 'mortgage' term AND the "California mortgage' term and objects to you profiting from their advertisers over paying.

fallentimes• 18 years ago

Does anyone have any experience actually using this site for a purpose? How was it?

froo2• 18 years ago

I'm having a hard time believing sourcetool's argument that they were more than an arbitrage spam site.

It is a bunch of scraped content, with ads around it. I don't see any additional value provided by sourcetool and I definitely don't believe the search engine argument as search engines generally add value by at least ranking pages somehow, there doesn't appear to be any logical order to how the pages are ranked more than when they appeared in the sourcetool database.

Some pages are nothing more than a series of keywords with ads around it, here's a perfect example chosen at random, I landed on a page for a business called "Sundeal", nothing but keywords.

The "Brief Description" are the exact words for the title tag of Sundeal's homepage, all other content (that is not part of the standard sourcetool layout) is simply the keywords meta repeated twice.

I'd almost be inclined to say this article was paid placement itself.

Mod me down for those who don't agree, but I hold nothing but contempt for this sourcetool site.

josefresco2• 18 years ago

It's pretty much a glorified website directory, and not a great example of the types of sites that have a legitimate beef with Google's heavy-handed tactics.

froo2• 18 years ago

Google's heavy-handed tactics.

I don't agree with this, I think Google has every right to provide it's main customers (searchers) the best possible product that they can. If anything, removing sites like these actually cut into Google's profits.

I have no problem with directories that are trying to drive legitimate, organic traffic to their sites, nor do I have a problem with any kind of web directory - I think that anyone who is adding value to the net should be commended.

I just think that if their whole reason for existence is to convert inbound adwords clicks into outbound adsense clicks by using scraped content, how can that possibly be valuable?

Most people here could easily replicate this site in the space of an afternoon and have the content up within days - grab an RDF dump from DMOZ, insert those URL's into any off the shelf spider and capture meta data from those pages and mash it up = instant spam site, does it add value? Most definitely not.

furiouslol2• 18 years ago

Maybe it's just me but I'm calling a major BS on the $155k/m profit claim.

1) Assuming he got 100k visitors per month

2) Assuming each arb gets him $0.10 per click.

3) Assmuning 50% of the visitors click 1 ad (and that's wildly optimistic)

His profit would be 50k x $0.10 = $5k/mth

If he were to get $155k in profit per month. he needs to get about 3 million visitors per month. I checked Alexa, Compete and his site is nowhere that figure.

Not sure what's his motive in inflating the profit figure though. He's only going to attract more competition to his field and kill his business in the process.

Maybe he's planning to write an ebook to convince people into believing that it is easy to earn that much with search arb and hence, he'll use the NYtimes article as evidence.

With each ebook selling for $99.99 and 100% profit margin, it'll take him only 1550 sales/month to meet his imaginary $155k profit claim. Now, that's a business plan!

furiouslol2• 18 years ago

Ok. I'm going to eat my words now.

He did get 3million visits per month.

http://www.quantcast.com/sourcetool.com/traffic (Change the period to All-Time)

Massive drop from 3million visits in April 06 to 100k in April 08 and now 10k in Aug 08.

Amazing if he attracted the 3 million people to his site purely with Adwords alone.

I wonder how many terms he has to bid for (> 100k?)

Stuck in Google’s Doghouse? Solution: mail DoJ

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