Google Quietly Closes AdSense API to Small Sites

NewsCloud writes "Google has raised the required minimum traffic limit for publishers who wish to use its AdSense API to 100,000 page views per day. The AdSense API was introduced in March as a way for sites with user generated content to share advertising revenue with their members. Says Google, "This policy change will probably result in fewer developers going live and give us a chance to enhance our support resources and processes to more easily support a greater number of developers in the future...we hope to be able to lower it in the future as we become more efficient at supporting our developers!" Meanwhile, some publishers report waiting a month for their API usage to be approved. I take Google at its word for now but worry that small developers could be increasingly squeezed out of the mashup space if this were to become a trend."

Competition

[biocute]

Is there any competition to capture this <100K market?

Anyway, site developers can still share profits with contributing users, it's just less transparent and more tedious to work out the portions.

Re:The Road

[synx]

Maintaining a high level of customer service is an admirable goal. Why is this "evil"? Note, this isn't closing _adsense_ but the Adsense API.

100,000 pageviews

[MarkRose]

100,000 pageviews a day may seem small in comparison to some sites on the web, but that actually limits the number of sites to only a few thousand. I run a site that gets roughly 50,000 pageviews a day, and also ranks in the top 50,000 sites on alexa.com. If pageviews across sites are skewed exponentially towards the busiest sites, that means that roughly 10,000 or less sites are eligible to participate. Interesting.

Re:Slashdot quietly supports blogspam

[klenwell]

Google does in various ways, too. I run a couple adword campaigns for fun (bids all under 5 cents) and the only place where my ads show up as I far as I can tell are weird site like this:

http://icanhascheezburer.com/ [icanhascheezburer.com]

Ok, not blogspam, but a linkfarm. But wouldn't be surprised if Google run a few hundred thousand spam blogs, too. (After all, they do own Blogger which, as much as I like it, is from a certain perspective little more than an extensive backwater of blogspam.)

In response to an email I sent them, a Google rep acknowledged these are Google sites. Fine, they provide an advertising space for cheapskates like me who wish to pay 2 cents a click. But I found it interesting that they don't identify these as Google-run sites, or even put the usual 'Ads by Google' tag with the ad blocks. And as their response shows, they don't make it exactly easy to disassociate yourself from this stuff if you're running a budget campaign:

Thank you for your email. I apologize for the delay in responding to your email. Please note that the site icanhascheezburer.com is not necessarily a link farm. This website is a part of our AdSense for domains program. AdSense for domains allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to display AdWords ads on their websites. AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages by using Google's semantic technology to analyze and understand the meaning of the domain names. Note that ads shown on an an AdSense for domain site need not display the 'ads by Google' label. Ads on such sites only display the 'Sponsored links' label.

Please be assured that parked domain sites are included in the Google Network because of the value they add to both users and advertisers. Our internal data show that parked domain sites typically convert at rates equal to that of search and content pages.

We do realize that advertisers may not want their ads to show on such sites. Please note that turning off the Content Network will cause your ad to stop showing on all the sites on the Content Network including AdSense for domains.

Not sure if the API gives you any finer control over where your ads appear, but if it did, one effect of removing it from small advertisers might be consigning their ads to more wastelands like this.

They screw the smaller ones anyway

[DreamerFi]

Every single smaller advertiser I know that has attempted to get some money through advertising for google had their account yanked a few weeks before it reached the point where google actually had to pay something. Every single one. And always without any way to challenge the yanking, as in "we detected click-fraud and YOU have to prove we're wrong, but we won't show you anything that may help you".

Guess who's permanently in my adblock filter?

Re:100,000 pageviews

[Frozen Void]

People who watch their privacy and block counters,don't install toolbars are making an intelligent choice, but they remove themself from statistics.It has some disadvantages on the
scale of entire internet.
See, people base popularity on the statistics,
and having these statistics requires to users to give up some of the privacy.Examples:
How many Linux users are there?>>
Does our company needs to develop for them?
Is this site really popular? >>Whats its pageviews in alexa?
My statistics webcounter shows that absolute majority of customers are using windows XP with Internet Explorer.>>why should i support other browsers?

If any of these queries are answered,the answer comes from statistics.Not from anything,else.Surveys,Polls and other methods which require participation aren't reliable enough for most people(as the results can be skewed by interested parties).
Linux users,and people who use more secure browsers,are more concerned about these issues: the statistics are biased against them.