My favourite sin: Greed
Search Engine Roundtable just announced that Google will offer impression-based pricing for Ad Words. That’s just another sign of Google’s greed. PPC fraud already is a problem and they want to create another one before solving the first. I don’t think that a normal person will buy this service. On the end publishers and advertisers are loosing money while Google encreases their revenues.
Blah…and once I loved Google
Actualy you got the ideea wrong… PPC fraud is not the issue, or at least it’s not the BIG issue, the big issue is that Ad Words no longer work as well as they used to, and this leads to: decrease in Google revenues but unfortunatly also leads to the content provider revenues going down; which inevitably leads to overall crappy content througout the www. So by this Google is doing the good thing, as they usualy do… secure a little future slice of pie for themselfs *AND* ensure that quality and up to date content still survives on the web. The down side? … well some could argue that advertisers will now have to pay for the crappy option of having their ads just viewed compared to what they used to get: highly targeted visitors…. BUT, and there is a big one, it seems to me that this would only be the normal way to go, meaning that the days when you got a big marketing boost just by having your ad promoted on milions of sites without paying a cent for views are over. It’s time to pay for promoting your image, slogan or whatever.
Remember that others have offered this marketing option for a long, long time. To me, this is just Google saying: no more freebies for advertisers, it’s time for content providers to get their share.
And by the way it’s just an option that will be side by side PPC, an alternative marketing tool or whatever you want to call it…