Willisburg.org

Today’s post is about the declared death of AdSense, a form of life after AdSense, advertising for others, and consumer privacy. This post will be the most important one I’ve ever made as it can help many people, and it won’t cost anyone but me bandwidth and time. Before starting though, there’s important context to be had. It’s going to be a monolithic post, but read it anyway as you will not be disappointed, especially if the first sentence made any sense to you…

Things have been busy and hectic these past few weeks. Money’s also been really tight lately as I’m still unemployed. The local economy is booming right now for blue collar jobs which is wonderful, but I’m not in a position that allows me to do manual labor anymore. To make matters worse, the IT sector is in a massive recession right now, and most of the jobs that are available anymore are either highly targeted and skilled positions or manual labor, the first of which I don’t have the knowledge or background to do and the latter falling into the same caveat as blue collar manual labor for me. Other jobs are unfortunately inaccessible as well due to the financial situation. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. But I’m already veering off target. Although some of you read for the sake of knowing what’s going on in my life, this is neither the time nor the forum to dive into detail regarding my financial situation… especially when there’s far bigger fish to deal with on this post.

The thing about being financially strapped is that loved ones around you want to help, and it’s a wonderful thing to experience. Without that help, I wouldn’t be treading water right now… granted, the treading isn’t great… but it’s better than drowning. Everyone who has helped, I’m eternally greatful for. The funny thing about it all is the outpouring of offered and found “self employment” opportunities that have come across my radar during this time, especially from those who know and understand that I’m attempting to lay the groundwork for my own business…

Due to past situations growing up, I’ve gotten jaded by these sorts of “business opportunities” as I’ve seen them eat away the money and savings of those around me. They’re part of the foundation to my pessimism, scepticism, and general distrust of this world. The thing is, some wonderful things have been happening in my life these past few weeks with my faith. Although I’ve faltered a little on the commitment of my growth in the Word these past two weeks since being between churches, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m changing in my attitudes towards life and others. Where I once took a sick joy in seeing people get scammed (sometimes my own family, sadly enough), I can no longer do. It’s wrong and cruel. Everyone deserves better than to be scammed, and I’d want someone else to tell me the cold hard truth if what I was getting involved in was a scam as well. No matter how much the truth hurts, it’s best to know before losing too much time and money. Which brings us to today’s post and my emerging from the shadows again.

A close friend approached me today with some information regarding “The Death of Google AdSense” and “A Life After Google AdSense” which he was kind enough to pass along to me so I didn’t have to sign up to read it. It peaked my interest as although the first PDF that was shared with me was about 17 pages too long, the author of this piece made some valid points despite my unnerved hesitance from the language being used and the subtle admittance to how he used AdSense to make money. This Scott fellow had pegged a serious and honest statement on the nose: AdSense as even a reasonable source of advertising income has now become worthless for any real return due to the ability of AdWords users to set much lower prices on clickthroughs for affiliate sites. So I moved forward and read over the 53 page PDF document follow up regarding how you can still make money doing advertising online after this significant change.

When I finished, I laughed my ass off. Scott is brilliant, I won’t debate that. I also won’t lie to you, some people may actually be able to make some money out of his get-rich-quick ideas in the beginning, but it won’t last and it’s not as rosy as it’s painted. Simply put, his plan is the beginning of the end of Google AdWords… but before we dive into the reasons why I say this, let’s dissect the death of AdSense first.

“The things that will destroy America are … the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

Scott was right about “Smart Pricing” killing AdSense. The ability for advertisers to discount the value of affiliate site clickthrough was a necessary move by Google to combat clickthrough fraud. This move resulted in near worthless clickthrough values for affiliate links because the overall quality of most affiliate clickthrough customers had deteriorated. The same thing happened with impression based affiliate advertising on the Internet a few years back, and now the cycle is repeating with clickthrough advertising.

What we need to do is to look at why AdSense has failed from an objective point-of-view and to look at a bit of history and understand why impression based advertising pays in hundredths of a cent now. Impression based advertising has failed and gotten so worthless to host because it was abused and the market glutted with these ads. You still see remnants of it to this day at sites like Tom’s Hardware Guide where there’s more ads than content on any one given page. Impressions became worthless because of the market saturation that was created by people trying to monetize and make a living out of whoring their websites out for as much money as possible by breaking articles down into single paragraph pages and showing the same ads over and over.

Then along came AdSense from Google. They had created a means of more effective online advertising by providing high-paying clickthrough ads. This was fantastic news for smaller sites that just wanted to make a little cash on the side to recoup hosting fees or whatnot. The only problem is, is that the greedy scammers got ahold of it as well and bled it dry. But how? Well, Scott comes right out and frankly discusses his former AdSense revenue methods on page eight. He ran over 3000 black-hat websites that did nothing but generate AdSense link pages and junk content, both of which are against the Google AdSense ToS. He admits that AdSense is dead, but what he doesn’t admit to is that he’s one of the people directly responsible for killing it in the first place! Affiliate site clickthrough became worthless for legitimate advertisers because over 90% of the AdSense affiliate sites are worthless now and any clickthrough traffic on those ads are nearly as worthless because most web users are tricked into going instead of going out of genuine interest and want nothing to do with the resulting page. To make matters worse, this method of page and site generation has cluttered and destroyed decent search results from any search engine, even Google’s. This behavior was ruining the value of AdSense for everyone but Google, and something needed to be done to keep the scammers from being able to continue to profit from their gray-area methods.

And it’s working. Slimeball get-rich-quick gurus are abandoning AdSense, as is evident by this Scott fellow’s direct addressing of the issue. But the damage has already been done and nothing can reverse it. Clickthrough advertising rates are now in the toilet, just like impression advertising, and it’s there because of oversaturation by greedy abusers both using what he called black and white hat methods. Both methods killed it because the advertising was done to get rich, not to produce real and valuable content and make a little pocket change off of it.

“A degree of lying - you know, white lies - seems to be inherent in all languages and all forms of communication.”

-Matthew Lesko

Scott announced and kept his promise regarding making the information from his two PDF files “free” to obtain where he “details” his new proposals on how to continue getting rich quick. I want to make this painfully clear: Other than questionable ethics and public admittance to violating AdSense Terms of Service, everything this man has said in his two PDF booklets is likely true. Even better, the man actually believes in what he’s trying to sell which adds to his overall “credibility.”

What he’s not telling you is that he is getting paid for the downloaded copies of his scheme even though you aren’t paying directly. The fact that he’s willing to pass on to the people who’s already signed up a monetary sum roughly equaling half of a US dollar for each person they bring in and sign up indicates that there is a cash flow here. The people who sign up to read the PDF files aren’t dropping a dime, but they’re paying for the information with something far more valuable than their money. By providing a real name, e-mail address, and setting a password, he’s tagged you as a get-rich-quick sucker and is likely selling that information to the people he calls whales. Of course, you’ll never know what he’s doing with that information because he has absolutely no privacy policy posted anywhere on any of his related sites and as a business website is in direct violation of US law. Even if he was ballsy enough to post one, he’d likely state that everything shared and submitted would be sold at random to the highest bidder with no ability to opt out of this.

But you could say, “Willis, you have no proof that he’s actually doing that!” No, I don’t, but I do have a PDF file in front of me that describes using this exact process to lure clickthroughs in, entice them to enter a bit of information, and pass that information off to another advertising company. He describes the process as a flipping of clickthroughs and details the method used to monetize that personal information harvested in pp.17-18. If he tells you that the money is in gathering sales contact leads and selling them off to others, what makes you think he isn’t doing just that with your information? Especially when he’s blatantly admitted to ripping off Google already with 3,000+ sites in direct violation of the ToS? This is not a man with a track record of integrity and honesty in his business dealings.

To make this assumption more damning, he even admits at the end of the second book that, “You already have the keys to the kingdom!” and that the username and password you entered to get the first report “…will unlock other websites in the near future.” He then proceeds to give you links to “parter” CPA networks where he’s cut special deals for you to get started with… sites that will wind up harvesting your full address, phone number, and social security number to set up an account with. What he’s done is guaranteed his “whales” to provide the motherload advertising profile on the most gullible people on the planet. And all you’re out is the money you invest in advertising to try and do the same thing he is on smaller, more worthless fish…. and your very valuable personal information in the hands of companies with questionable reputation and motives.

You angry yet? Well guess what, I’m nowhere near finished with this.

“Your name is ‘you’re wanting,’ and you can’t play the man’s game, you can’t close them, and then tell your wife your troubles. ‘Cause only one thing counts in this world: get them to sign on the line which is dotted. You hear me you f*ck*n’ f*gg*ts?”

-Alec Baldwin as Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross

Let’s take a look at the proposal itself and the financial claims that Scott makes, shall we? He claims that the money is where the money is. This is true, albeit a bit of an oxymoron. The money is where your customers are, nowhere else. His methods indicate that if you don’t wuss out and make the efforts early on, the money will just roll in. He cites examples of setting up six figure returns for people doing this method of money making. I don’t doubt his raw numbers, and I genuinely think he’s done that for people. But he’s left out some valuable information and perspective.

First, there’s taxes. The reported net income of this six figure income is before taxes on the gross income, so it’s not a true net income. You’ll notice that this net income however comes at the cost of an expensive advertising budget, and since the gub’mint doesn’t tax you on your net income but your gross, you’re in for a world of hurt when the IRS comes a knocking when they find out that you’re grossing a half mil a year. Some of this damage can be minimized through careful accountant work which is expensive and ties liquid assets up in non-liquid assets, but it is possible. Even still, if you followed his advice to the letter and things stayed stable and you didn’t change the status quo, and you were smart about how you set up your company, you could still likely clear a good $15-35k after taxes a year… it’s not a glamorous promise of a six figure income, but it’s not bad.

Except for one thing, what about growth? Well that brings us to point two, that net income doesn’t factor in trying to grow the business farther by purchasing more tiny ads through AdWords to keep the business growth up, and considering the budget costs? You’ll likely never see a dime of your promised six figure income until you plateau the business and stop re-investing. This is fine and dandy except for one thing, the keywords you’ll be using will change on a regular basis due to changes in fads and trends which makes the market dynamic.

Which brings us to the third problem. As trends and keywords change, your ROI drops and cuts into your already meager profit for the money going through your hands. This causes you to constantly scramble and tweak to stay on the curve and try and keep returns high. Now you’re spending even more money on lower ROI keywords and spending even more still to try and find new profitable words to replace the failing old ones…

…and brings us to point number four. You won’t be the only person trying to cash in and purchase sweet spot rankings for AdWords or any other ad agency on these hot keywords. You’ll be going right up against everyone else trying to do the same thing and buy ads to funnel people to your middle-man website to harvest their personal information and sell to someone else, information that you don’t even see. This is going to drive the cost of the key and successful AdWords purchases up. This method is going to drive the cost of AdWords placement up. You’ll still be able to pay crap to affiliates that you get clickthroughs on, but the good leads are going to be from Google directly and rotation and placement of your ads on both their search engine and on affiliate sites will increase in cost to keep position due to the increased demand on those keywords… this guy has already guaranteed it by ruining AdSense and trying to monetize AdWords. So as time progresses and more and more advertisers flood AdWords and similar networks trying to harvest user’s info for other companies based of search keywords (the very same method of monetizing AdSense I might add that lead to the ruin of AdSense for everyone but Google), advertising overhead creeps up higher and higher cutting into your net income.

Now, let’s cover point five… infrastructure. None of these other things have even factored in the cost of web hosting and the costs associated with handling the traffic that this method potentially generates. There’s going to be domain registrations, potential SSL certificate purchases, and bandwidth costs on top of everything else.

Finally, let’s go into the final point, point six. There are only so many people in the world, less so as advertising marks. This is only a small percentage of the population, but profitable enough to warrant the money spent and risks taken through spam advertisements, junk mail, and solicitation calls. The thing is, is that this segment is finite. Given enough time, there will start to develop heavy redundancy in the customer names that get harvested. Plus, you’ll have to factor in backlash that will develop from people sick of making what was once worthwhile advertisements worthless by adding in pointless middle-man websites that keep them from what they’re really after. These people will give dummy information just to get past the worthless crap and move on to what they were after. These two factors combined with hundreds of new sources for this information is going to drive down the overall value of these sorts of sales leads.

You’re now probably asking yourself why would anyone want to do this then. Let’s pose that question and answer it, shall we?

WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO TRY AND MAKE MONEY BY SPENDING MONEY TO ADVERTISE THEIR OWN WEBSITES AND PASS GENUINE CUSTOMERS OFF THAT THEY JUST HAD TO OTHER ADVERTISERS AND BUSINESSES FOR A PITTANCE COMPARED TO WHAT THAT CUSTOMER WILL LIKELY SPEND AND WHAT THEIR FURTHER INFORMATION WOULD BE WORTH TO OTHERS IF YOU ACTUALLY WANTED TO SELL IT?

….

“The bottom feeders always get screwed!”

-Scott Boulch, Life After AdSense - Climbing the Internet Food Chain

You’re still doing the dirty work, and you’re adding in an unnecessary and unneeded level to advertising commerce. To top it off, the methods you’d use will kill the effectiveness and value of Google’s AdWords, just like AdSense was killed. You’ll hurt yourself, numerous small businesses, and only further sour the general public towards advertising on a whole due to the overwhelming levels of borderline sensory overload unscrupulous advertising and impossible to stem personal information brokering that you’d help continue to unleash on the Internet. Everyone who will do this will only hurt us all, and there will only be one person who truly makes any money off of this whole situation…

…do you know who that person is? I’ll give you a hint… I quoted him somewhere in this article.

This is not a means to make money for yourself. Advertising for others is a dead-end proposition, no matter how you paint it and dress it up. Additionally, if you have to pay or give something up of your own of any significant value to participate? It’s likely scam-like in nature. I can’t technically call it a scam, because it can work, but it won’t work for most people. The numbers are stacked against you. Additionally, if you fancy yourself to have any integrity or honesty, can you actually sleep at night knowing that you’re brokering people’s information for a measly living to businesses who don’t deserve those contacts and will abuse that information?

Real companies and real advertising campaigns don’t involve individuals as advertising middle-men. If you have to pay to be paid to advertise for someone else, you’re most likely getting ripped off. This proposal of a life after the death of AdSense to try and get rich quick? It’s only going to eventually kill AdWords, and it’s going to hurt legitimate small businesses in the process.

Let me break down the realities of the channels that exist in real advertising, both passive and targetted. You have:
1) Businesses who pay to advertise their product using
2) Advertising Brokers who create the ads and sell them to
3) Content Providers who are paid to present the ads to
4) Consumers who are being targetted by the Businesses, Advertising Brokers, and Content Providers.

There may exist an extra layer or two of resale amongst the content providers, but that’s it! Only four layers, and it’s specifically designed for individuals to be in a specific station in life. A CONSUMER. The best any one individual can hope to be without their own tangiable product or service is a content provider, and it’s been demonstrated time and again that the only way to make a consistent income is through providing a quality medium for those advertisements to reside in. It’s simple economic and biologic theory. Survival of the fittest.

Scott wants you to believe that you’ve magically climbed the ladder into the advertising broker realm because you’re making so much more money off of each advertisement, and as you’re the one now buying ads to be placed, you must be a broker! WRONG! Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. Fact of the matter is, with this plan you’re still a content provider. Even worse, he’s now converted you back over to being a consumer again for the privledge to try and continue to be a content provider. Why else would he give you surveys and links to services provided by others?

The only thing that’s changed is now you’re doing all the hard work of what the advertising brokers are supposed to be paid to do for free in addition to making it easier for others to market things to you. Nothing has changed except that you’re now risking even more of your own money for an even lower return of investment in the game of trying to be a major player in the content provision channel, for work that should be paying you far more than you’re actually getting for taking on responsibilities you shouldn’t have in your position, in addition to handing over your personal information for free to these same people who are exploiting you to advertise for their clients so they can continue to further and better advertise to you their clients and their own worthless services and get-rich-quick schemes. Do you get it yet?

Scott set up a good thing for himself. What he’s preaching, he’s practicing, but he’s playing in a whole other league than what he’s getting you into… and your information is his source of income. He’s creating the master list of all master lists for unscrupulous active advertising, the most profitable of sales leads as the ROI is enormous due to materials invested are time and a pamphlet to sell to these people. He’s collecting a list of poor people who dream of getting rich for very little work and money and are willing to throw their life savings away at anyone who presents them with a pretty enough proposal, and the list has already started strong with over 22,000 people in less than a week. The worst thing is, is that with the exception of a missing privacy policy, there’s nothing directly dishonest or illegal about the whole thing. It’s gray, but it’s above board. Nothing he claims is impossible to achieve right now. It’s just morally bankrupt, devoid of any scruples, and has the odds stacked against you as more and more people get involved… just like any other advertising scam. Just honest enough to get away with it.

Now that I’ve either dashed your dreams or pissed you off, I’m going to give you a bit of hope and tell you how to make a fortune. Work hard, start your own business, be honest in your dealings with customers, provide them with a service or product of tangible worth, and save every penny you make and live like you’re poor. Don’t go into debt, don’t buy frivolous luxuries, and don’t waste money. Inflation is going through the roof and real-estate is bottoming out while gas prices and taxes continue to rise. Hard times are coming for all of us. Do something pro-active like getting the word out about this to your friends and family and not signing up.

If you’re thankful for my insight, let me know. If I can just keep one person from getting involved with this, I’ll be happy and know my efforts were not wasted. Defenders of this scheme who have read everything I wrote and still think I’m full of crap can blow. I obviously can’t change your mind, what makes you think you can change mine? I wish you luck on this your umteenth attempt to “start your own business” by advertising for other companies.

Best of luck, and may God bless.

Not a Guru,
Willis