I’ve had about enough of google adsense. They’ve been a monopoly for long enough and are really starting to treat people poorly.

Now, I know that it is still by far the absolute best contextual advertising program around. It has done wonders for the average joe being able to make money online. I mean, you can put up a page about anything and immediatly get very targeted ads on the page without having to do squat.

However, recently google has been taking too much advantage of the position they have.

Some examples:

Recently one of my adsense incomes was cut in half. Page impressions stayed the same, ctr stayed the same, content on the pages stayed the same, but income was cut in half. Google just lowered the payouts. I have numerous friends who have complained about the same things. Some of them were affected more than I was, like having income go from $1500/day to $300/day.

Yes, that’s still a lot of money ($300/day), but $1500/day is much better.

Another example is I’ve had multiple people from writingup.com complain about getting clicks and not getting paid for the clicks. I’ve seen it before where you get 1 or 2 clicks with no money, but TWENTY clicks! I had another person get a sequence of clicks like 6, 15, 7, 4 on subsequent days and not make any money!

I know these people weren’t clicking on the ads themselves (we talked about it), so why aren’t they getting paid for it.

I have a beta account for yahoo’s version of adsense and can tell you that it’s not a real competitor with adsense yet. They have the same ad formats yet their ctr’s are about half that of adsense ctr’s. Yahoo’s program isn’t even close to adsense yet. Hopefully it will get there at some point.

What I’d really like to see right now is microsoft come out with their own version of adsense. I believe they’ll do a better job than Yahoo has and they’ll do a really big push with it.

What happens then?

Google’s stock will go down because their earnings will go down because people will switch their adsense code for microsoft code. No matter how much people dislike microsoft and want to see google beat them, money is money. And if Microsoft is going to pay where google isn’t, so be it.

I’ll switch.

I’ve run the yahoo ads enough now to know that they’re not nearly as profitable as adsense ads, but I’d guess they’ll get there at some point.

I would also hope that at some point someone comes out with a system that’s open about payment instead of the complete closed box that google is. Google doesn’t tell anyone anything about what’s going on and it drives people nuts.

So how do you explain halving the income from about 10 different sites, that are totally unrelated to each other, all at once? Google doesn’t explain it, they don’t have to.

Hopefully some day they will.

Hopefully some day someone else will so I don’t have to deal with google anymore.

They’ve ticked me off enough times now (and yet I still continue to use them because of their monopoly)…Dang monopoly!

At least it was the best thing to ever happen to online publishers. Horray for dumb ol google.