Jensense is reporting that Google is sending out letters to MFA and Arbitrage publishers informing them that their accounts will be closed down as of June 1st, giving them about two weeks to either shut down their PPC campaigns or find a new monetization method for them.
For once, Google is really handling themselves well on this issue. Not only have they given their publishers a two week heads-up to get their accounts in order, but they’ve assured the publishers that they will honour the amount of income earned up ’til the accounts close. It is reported that even high volume publishers (i.e. earning over $10,000 a month) are receiving these notices as well, so there is no exception after a certain income level.
Overall, this change makes a lot of sense for Google. Most publishers won’t touch the content network, due to the amount of MFA arbitrage sites out there, and after a small dip in earnings I could see this change affecting our income positively in the long term… provided Google doesn’t close our account. This is very unlikely, because while our sites are a bit spammy, we don’t do arbitrage at all and our sites have unique content on them, not scraped content in the MFA style. However, I’ll still be nervous until after June 1st!
Initially, I see a lot of MFA arbitragers pulling the adwords campaigns. US publishers may hop over to YPN quickly, but Yahoo is usually pretty quick to adopt the same ToS policies as Google with their publishing networks. I’m not too concerned about this, as we usually block MFA arbitrage sites from displaying on our account anyway. Ironically, our publisher advice for the past two months was that we were losing valuable revenue from blocking sites!
Hopefully (and I’m sure this is what Google is shooting for), real and legitimate publishers will regain confidence in the content network and begin using it again. This will result in competition for rankings and higher payouts for legitimate publishers and Google themselves.
I do feel sorry for the people earning a living on arbitrage, because after going through what happened to us over December / January… I know how bad it sucks to see your online income reduced. I am sure it is much worse if online income is your main job and it’s disappearing entirely. However, this is often the nature of online business… your rankings or method of profit (especially if it is sketchy, and MFA arbitrage is sketchy at best) can evaporate over night. You have to be a crazy entrepreneur to take the heat!
Good Profits.
May 21st, 2007 at 1:27 am
yea… i think it’s time for the adsense arbitragers to get a new way to make money. haha!
Wonder what will be next hot trend.