Learning from Google and Adsense
On Monday Google AdSense disclosed the revenue share offered to publishers through two of their products, AdSense for content and AdSense for search.
There are many differences in what Google AdSense and Football Media each provide for web publishers, and I strongly maintain that football blogs (or other sites for that matter) shouldn’t use AdSense as their primary monetization strategy. But that’s not the point.
The most interesting part about the revelations (which conspicuously omitted any mention of ‘Premium AdSense Publishers’ who get higher revenue share and several other perks) is how well Google have done to keep their costs down and margins high enough to offer publishers 68% in revenue share. This is purely down to automation – allowing millions of advertisers and publishers to seamlessly create adverting campaigns and monetize websites without the need to go through a real live person.
I read the article this morning and it got me thinking about the different ways we could learn from Google’s management of their AdSense products. It’s important to look at three aspects – reducing costs, increasing gross revenues and improving our brand (so as to attract more prominent advertisers and publishers) – and evaluating which methods and guiding principles work for us or not.
For example, one of the driving forces behind setting up Football Media was to provide ‘more’ services to our partners (publishers and advertisers) than traditional media agencies. The personalised approach has it’s downsides – it’s costly once you start scaling upwards and it can become irrelevant very quickly if the profit margins offered by another agency are higher than yours. Then again, the services model is also something that sets us apart, and if we want to continue with it then we would have to work on improving efficiency and focusing on premium publishers and advertisers almost exclusively, which brings with it another set of questions.
Football Media is still evolving, and we’ll keep working on improving the results and the quality of service that we offer to our publishers and advertisers. You’ll read about these changes over the summer right here on this blog, so make sure to follow us on twitter for all the latest updates.
Have to agree with you. Adsense should definitely be avoided as a primary focus. I have no doubt that if you continue to focus on service and quality that you will succeed in the long term.