Dangerous Game
Filed Under (the PPC Book) by Jeff Hudson on 15-09-2008
Barry Schwartz highlights a NY Times article this morning that details the story of an online entrepreneur, a gem named Mr. Savage, who built his entire business, a not so content rich nor useful Sourcetool.com, around Adwords and Adsense (problem #1), and then was devastated when slapped with the Quality Score bag o’ rocks.
The difference between this guy and everyone else? He wrote a letter to the Justice Department. As I’ve hinted and is documented everywhere, the Justice Dept. is taking this kind of thing seriously and is out there doing research.
Is Google anti-competitive?
Sure, there is no one who can compete with them.
Is it their fault?
No.
Google has a right to protect the experience of it’s users. This guy was making $100k per month by using Adwords to send traffic to a worthless arbitrage page with nothing but feeds and Adsense ads.
This is an entire business model that was solely made possible by the invention of Adsense, and he’s complaining when they decide he’s not providing enough value for his users.
Is Google perfect and holy and always right?
No, of course not. But in this case, Mr. Savage is blaming Google because he’s too lazy to go out and find other advertisers for himself. Which probably could have made him even more money had he put some work into it. Mr. Savage - you sir, are a tool.
