Can AdSense Hurt The Internet?

Thursday June 15th 2006, 3:09 am
Filed under: Adsense News, Original Article

Last week, Seth Jayson writes about how Google is killing the Internet. The Motley Fool article has sparked up the discussion and catch attention of many in the Net.

TechDirt writes about it, Scott Karp says that Google is killing Internet’s economics of content, Dave Winer thinks it is changing the world in a right direction, while Yaro says that AdSense has gone too far.

What do I say?

Will AdSense kill the Internet? No. Not that easy. First, advertisers who pay for the clicks will judge the effectiveness of the ads. If it doesn’t bring in money, they will stop advertising. Google have to continually filter out publishers that do not bring value to advertisers. Now that competition from Yahoo Publisher Network and Microsoft adCenter is getting nearer to reality, in a very near future Google will have to clean up the Made-For-AdSense, link farms, splogs, and scraper sites.

Next on, I do agree that there is a serious problem for AdSense, YPN, and the likes. After some time, people will start to get ‘text-ad-blindness’, just like what happened to banner ads not so long ago. In a way, this is a blessing in disguise. Remember a few years back when every website has some banner or flash in them? People get banner-blindness, disgusted, and abandon the banner.

This is how the Internet does it’s self-correction. When this happen (probably not that fast), Google will either have to find new revenue source or they pack up and close shop. The Internet will go on, with a new innovative advertisement model.

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