So as most of my readers know, I have two models of Internet income that have been feeding the family, the dogs, and keeping the bills paid full time. One is the PPC arbitrage model, and the other one is pure natural organic traffic. Update:

This blog you are reading makes next to nothing because of the subject matter, and the fact that I rarely make a post anymore. The niche blogs are where it is at for earning of course.

So when we started working Internet income my wife and I focused on Adsense arbitrage (PPC traffic sites that have Adsense ads) and it worked really well for about 6 years. Keep in mind these were not your typical crappy MFA (Made for Adsense) sites – they all had product to buy, and tons of content that was well written and original. They had lots of Adsense ads as well, they made the lion’s share of the profit.

• We were happy
• Google was happy
• Yahoo! was happy
• Adwords advertisers were happy
• Adsense was happy
• the users were finding the merchants and business was rolling for all!

Got scary in 2010 when Yahoo! start changing some of their network traffic sources. Got ripped off a few times and complained – we got all our money back – Yahoo was great for customer service.

Back in 2005 I WOKE UP and realized that this business model was going to be doomed one day, and if I didn’t get my sh*t together the PPC gig would suddenly stop cold, and we would have ZERO income. So I started blogging – THANK GOD ALMIGHTY!!!

The natural traffic slowly started to climb and slowly more and more of our profit was coming from the organic search model. Had to learn how write extensive posts. Had to learn what the search engines like the “most in a post”. Eventually it started to pay off. Two years after shifting gears and going “natural” about 1/3 of our profit came from that model. Better, but not enough to pay the bills by any means.

Kept at it and early 2010 when Yahoo started messing with their traffic sources and we got a little beat up with the PPC model, our natural traffic was making 50% of our total profit. I was freaking out at that time. 2010 has been our scariest year yet for business income. Spent allot of time swearing at Yahoo and MSN’s plans for the “transition”. Got over it though – it’s their jalopy and if they want to wreck it that is their business.

Then transition day came on Monday October 25th – the Yahoo! Panama PPC System went down and all traffic was now controlled by Adcenter – whew!!! We were still going and getting some good traffic for the arbitrage model. Making profit solid…………..for three days – then it died a stone cold dead Friday morning. So did my wife’s accounts. That was it! No more PPC model at all. We were naked in the wind at the mercy of the search engines and the visitors they brought us.

It was really scary seeing the low numbers coming in, and really scary seeing that Adcenter was not giving us ANY traffic at all. My wife tweaked our Adcenter accounts for days without any luck. The natural traffic was making enough money (and still is) to pay the bills, the mortgage, and all the rest, but we’re not “swimming in cash” anymore.

The Adcenter system costs more (CPC) to get traffic even when it does work, and you can’t get traffic or placement in the USA if you live in a different country. The Adcenter system is incredibly flawed. Campaigns and ad reporting is broken. No alerts on page quality. No alerts on inactive keywords or ads. No alerts period. Traffic estimates a joke. Not intuitive enough to give Adwords even a titter of concern.

The keyword system is ridiculous. Have to enter in mis-spellings, plurals, etc. When your ads are displayed they don’t have uppercase first letters in the title. Bing’s search results only have up 7 advertisers per page which is incredibly stupid. You can tell they are scrambling to make something worthy here and they are failing so far to “make it so”.

If they want to compete with Google’s Adwords they have light years to go. They have to admit they are number 2 to Adwords and act accordingly;

Allow “lesser” web site placement and take their money. We were spending over $500 a day in the Yahoo! Panama system, and now ZERO!. That is $15,000 a month they are not getting. If they don’t have enough “so-called quality” advertisers in their Sponsored Results lists to fill the page, then allow the so-called “lower quality” sites to populate the space below. They are leaving millions of dollars on the table just because they have an ideology bent on being “as good as Google”.

And it’s also pathetic that you can’t use the Adcenter system using a Mac or another browser besides certain Windows browsers. This is really hard to believe for a company this size. My head is shaking as I write this. So all those advertisers who are strictly Mac users had to buy a Windows machine or configure their Mac to run Windows. Then they have to do all the work to transition to Adcenter, and then…………………..NO TRAFFIC!

My wife handles PPC for clients as well, and all of them are going to Adwords only, because it’s too much to transition all the Yahoo! account to Adcenter. Never thought about that, did you MSN!!!

I have a friend who manages PPC and SEO for over 200 businesses and he did the same thing. ALL CLIENTS stopped using MSN-YAHOO and put their extra advertising budgets into Google Adwords. He estimates that he has stopped paying Yahoo! and Adcenter over $500,000 a month! That is just one company!!!!!

Did they really have a good look at what their customers were doing, and why. Didn’t they understand that the Yahoo! Panama customers were there because they couldn’t afford Adwords, and were going to be gone forever if their CPC climbed up even close to Adwords? Did they not know that a “clunky” transition was going to make a good percentage of the professional PPC companies leave all together because they don’t have the resources to transition ALL their clients to Adcenter. Did they not know that a safe place to be in their market place was the “Adwords Alternative” – the PPC option that allowed smaller budget, smaller companies to get some good traffic. Didn’t they know that the Yahoo! Panama system worked better for advertisers – better for everyone?

If I was at the top of the food chain there I would fire every last one of the implementation staff at the top down. I would demand that the whole system go Panama, and I would start head hunting for superior coders and engineers. Quite a mess MSN. Quite a mess.

Don’t Forget The Vista!!!

Related posts:

1. MSN Adcenter Mac Issues and Browser Problems MSN Adcenter is becoming a bigger joke as every day goes by. Now I find out that their editorial guidelines state that your landing pages must be able to load...
2. Google Msn and Yahoo! Hijacked Browser Results After seeing my MSN, Google and Yahoo! search results a few times I was pissed off to no end. What kind of scumbag losers are these spammers. This is pure...
3. PPC Pay-Per-Click Editorial Guidelines – Cowboy days are gone It’s interesting to see the “weeding out” process used by search engine advertising companies, such as Yahoo Search Marketing, Google Adwords, and MSN Adcenter these days. The days of PPC...
4. Yahoo! Distribution Network Click Fraud – We Got Defrauded Again! Once again, some of the fraudsters in the Yahoo! Distribution Network committed click fraud again, and cost us ALL of our profits, and even wiped out all of our profit...
5. PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Management Services Outsourced So my wife and I finally outsourced our PPC advertising to a company so we don’t have to handle any more annoying Yahoo Search Marketing, Google Adwords, and MSN PPC...
6. Hypervre Sites and Pages Getting Deindexed By Google, Bing, and Yahoo Got this email from a friend who is doing well with his Hypervre sites and pages. Thought it would interest my readers. As follows; Question: Hi Terry, Hope everything is...

This entry was posted on Friday, November 5th, 2010 at 11:36 am and is filed under Adsense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.