> Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did.
That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!"
Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.
But of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.
And we can get weaselly and say, "Well actually it's not Google, but it's the internet - or people - or technology - or economics - or thermodynamics" But the same point remains: Google chose to do this, too.
If we are to hold one to the standard of personal responsibility while relieving another of it for reasons of context and incentive? Well that just seems unfair. Hahaha! :)
Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising.
Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they see it.
The site author has many choices at this point. One of them is to make the site better for advertisers (and worse for users). He chooses this route. Google should have stopped this how?
My takeaway from the author's example is that Google has set up a system that is incentivising actions leading to worse outcomes for both users (frustrating search experience) and advertisers (whose ad spend is not being well spent).
Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
No. Gaming the system in bad faith was just gaming the system.
>> Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
Improvement in this case I assume meaning "identifying the site gamed the rules".
I suspect, but don't know, that Google spends a lot on trying to identify site quality. But the ones building spammy (gamey?) sites are winning.
Everything you say here is true, yet misses the point.
Google search results are dominated by sites just like the one presented. This is something one no one likes - not the people doing the searches, nor the people doing the advertising and definitely (as this post shows) not the people creating the sites. They would much prefer just to put up their content without spending hours on creating LLM SEO spam. I'm sure Google is worried if they don't do better someone will they will lose relevance.
Inquiring minds what to know how we ended up here. The article provides just that. It explains how the incentives Google have put in place drove him to producing one of those sites. He wanted that ad revenue and he wanted search results to find his site and the only way he could find to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on generating content he had no personal interest in was to pollute it with LLM spam.
You are criticising him for that, yet most web sites returned by Google all make that same choice. I guess according to you most of the web is acting in bad faith.
If your objective is to get out of this mess, I don't think explanations like "the word is shit because humanity sucks" are helpful. The explanation they are being pushed towards that choice by a perverse set of incentives is much more illuminating. Those incentives are controlled by one company - Google. That company could change them, either voluntarily or by being forced to.
1) Advertisers - plural? What other advertisers is Google referencing?
In this context, 'advertisers' means all the other meaningfully similar ad options that the author could choose from.
2) This wording: "The team has reviewed it but unfortunately your site isn’t ready to show ads at this time." is Google's clear and blatant refusal to extend their ad ~monopoly to his web page. A refusal that gets satisfied only after he loads his site up with useless, time wasting crap.
I'll grant the author did have a choice. The author could be denied access to Google's ad monopoly or he could crap up his web page.
It helps clarify that Google is lying - by pretending advertisers actively desire webpages that are unreadably overloaded with pap.
Again, you disclaim Google of any responsibility for choice but hold the author to one? Doesn't that biased difference strike you as jarring?
That's the point here. Everyone seems to complicate it; it's pretty simple.
I'm not against you specifically, I just think this is a clear issue. Admittedly, not a lot of people grasp this right now.
There's truth in this old chestnut but it has limits...
There's a spectrum from total freedom to pressure by incentives to the credible threat of violence. In extreme cases claiming someone "had a choice" is as ghastly as a free person claiming they had none.
Do you think it applies in this case? Do you think the incentive (a few $ at most) drove the author into a corner?
At the same time, I don't take issue with the title -- I don't read it as abdicating responsibility. The author knows he can remain ad-less. It's just a catchy way to say "I had to make these changes to get approved by ad-sense."
You do always have a choice. If you surrender that you become...inhuman...I think. Because you've said: "Now this thing I've done, is not my fault." Then you go around looking for other people to blame, which makes you a monster.
To be more clear (which is useful I think): it's not your choice what the world presents to you, but you choose how you respond always.
As long as you're not unconscious of course. If your mind is there, you're choosing.
But ultimately where you come down on that is up to you. I guess it comes down to: with how much integrity do you plan to live? :)
There could be some edge cases, but it's important to remember how valid that is for the majority of experience.
I didn't start it like this, but that got dark quick hahahah! :)
Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site.
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palatable to AdSense - but I don't see how any of it would help the AI and/or mechanical turk supposedly assigning target-demographic labels to this site.
Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid.
On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views.
I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...
That's not a fair analogy because the article describes the site like this:
> For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic.
Sure, we could do with more specific info, but it sounds very far from "a few cars a day" to me.
On the other hand, if I was getting a million users per day, I'd probably figure out who would care about that audience, and sell to them directly.
But how is the updated site any better? It surely must be, since it made it past the review, right? The whole post just shows how ridiculous and flawed the review process is and what it leads to.
EDIT: an alternative monetisation source if the OP didn't want to create a bunch of content would be affiliate links.
Why are words so important?
Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content.
Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites".
Therefore if you have a site that doesn't offer good advertising opportunities, then don't be surprised if people don't want to advertise on it.
To be clear, I'm not saying all sites should be ad friendly. I'm saying that advertising alone cannot prop up every site, useful or not.
If Google had competition in the ads space, this would be less of an issue, as the author could pick an advertiser that works for their website, rather than contorting their website for google
Or to put it another way, what product should this be advertising on this site? Because there are a lot of companies in the world, so of you can identify just one of them, they'll likely pay enough for exclusivity.
Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game.
I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.
Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.
But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?
Political ads? Campaign ads?
Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news?
People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.
So if there us the value you suggest, it should be an easy sell. Probably less work than he went to to tweak the site.
Then again, are people investigating vote targets undecided voters? And good luck getting media to advertise....
But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.
But seriously, there are plenty of ads that are based on geo located IP. Then of course there’s the cookie (and cookie replacement) ads.
Complaining about site content is pretty bogus.
And indeed, that cuts the site operator out of the loop, and forces them (if they want to make money from these ad algorithms) to design a site that will attract users with easily-intuited advertising needs. And the linked article doesn't have that.
[1] And still do in parallel niche markets like porn.
As soon as it can be gamed, it will be gamed. It's just the scammy nature of it all. Now that it's "AI" generated content, it will get to enshitified almost immediately on any system that is created
My website and it's content is what it is, and its not my job to make Google more valuable. They're a multi billion dollar company, if it's really a problem, they can figure it out.
Political ads? Ads targeted towards Americans (think cereal or whatever else why might see on national TV)? Crappy low-paying ads that aren't significantly targeted? Literally anything?
Plus, the auction value for spots on that site must be beyond tiny.
Oh right advertisers pay a price based on the amount of traffic so less traffic means even less cost for them.
There was ONE actual core piece of functionality they wanted to monetize, so why not?
By adding random crap, author was able to get it approved.
This just proves how everything is turning into the Internet Of Shit - or Enshitification. I loved how the article exposes this in context of the ad networks --- on which Google has an effective monopoly.
See also https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8?si=xaAgN3jx2ZC-GCwr (The Internet is Starting to Break by MrWhoseTheBoss).
Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on.
The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google.
The owner now has a crappy site, which is still a bad place for ads (although the review doesn't know it.) The ultimate goal, of getting revenue, is perhaps still unrealized.
The fact that AdSense can be gamed incentives gaming. Unlike Google, websites like these DO have competition, and so the ones that game the system most effectively make profits and the ones that operate most ethically go out of business.
If Google does not want AdSense to be gamed, they should close the loopholes that make it so easily gameable and that punish honest customers. However, they are not strongly incentivized to do this because neither websites nor advertisers have any good altetnatives, so they aren't meaningfully losing business over it. And so funds that could go toward fixing this are, instead, used in areas that need the funding more urgently.
Assigning fault here is silly. The websites could be better AND Google could be better — but they will not become better without the right incentive structure.
However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements.
The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to the site in the first place.
Why did the first attempt get rejected, yet the final attempt after making the website objectively worse gets accepted?
The useless information that needed to be added to the site contributes to the decline in quality many people are noticing when using google search nowadays. This article provides a very interesting explanation for this decline.
Or realize what using the service means for the website, and backpedal on the decision to use adsense.
Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call.
But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people might use it (for some definition of lots) but the site doesn't really give signals to adsense.
Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?
Are users browsing an arbitrary rubbish website more or less likely to be distracted by some special offer? Are people visiting your site to do some very specific task, presumably for a concrete reason, more or less likely to be distracted by an ad?
The problem isn't Google. The problem is that our ability to monetize the web starts and ends with adverts. Which means that sites that "do stuff" are a bad match, and therefore lack funding.
To be honest, I don't have a cunning plan of alternate funding. Probably the only other viable one is "take some of your day-job money and effectively sponsor the site yourself." Which of course is the model you -were- on that you wanted to leave.