Wall Street Journal article on AdSense

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the front page of today's (Oct. 16, 2003) Marketplace section: "Seeking Growth, Google Acts Like an Ad Agency."

For most readers of this forum, the article doesn't add a lot of new information, but I found the following interesting:

• All told, the company says it has "thousands" of publishers in its program but declines to be more specific.
  
• Consumers may respond less often to advertising in an online magazine because they have a different mind-set than consumers who run across ads after a search, says Chris Sherman, editor of SearchDay, an online newsletter on the search industry published by Jupitermedia Corp.'s SearchEngine Watch.com. Computer users do a Web search to help them research or buy something, which makes them "motivated" buyers, he says. Internet surfers who are reading a Web page and run across a contextual ad might not be in "immediate transaction mode," he says.
  
• Google's Ms. Wojcicki acknowledges that click-through rates on contextual ads are lower than search-related ads because contextual ads compete with more content on the page for the Internet surfer's attention. Although the click-through rates may be lower, the conversion rate -- the rate that the users purchase or complete transactions -- on contextual ads tends to be similar to those on search pages on average, though it may vary by campaign and advertiser, she says.

Doh...requires registration to view

I would think they are WAY above thousands of AdSense publishers. I would think they would be closer to 250,000ish... there are probably a thousand just from this forum. And I my psychic prediction puts them at 2,283,981 approved publishers by the time it has been out for a year.

- Shawn

Shawn.... how do you think that growth rate is going to affect the amount that is bid for clicks and the number of advertisers.

My payment per click is pretty juicy right now but... I am thinking that it will get pretty lean when we have that many publishers. More publishers than bidders.

It might have the same economics as a gold deposit.... early prospectors find the rich, easy deposits and later ones grub hard on the fringes for a little dust.

I'm not really sure to be honest... I don't think they per click will be less (mine is amazingly good as well), because you are going to get more advertisers, so there will be more competition for the AdWords bidding.

It's hard to say if the increase in advertisers will keep pace with the increase in publishers.

I'm guessing Google will throttle back the number of AdSense approvals if it starts getting bad. Quality is better than quantity (even for Google... because remember, they are only paying out a fraction of what they collect). From a business standpoint it doesn't make sense for them to have so many publishers that they are doing 50% PSA ads or whatever...

So I think they will keep some caps on the approved publishers if it looks like it will get to that point...

It's definitely in their best interest to keep the publishers happy.

- Shawn