Earnings UP - Life Without PayPal Is Good
Last month I posted about how sometimes being a webmaster sucks - I complained about Adsense earnings being down, getting banned from Paypal, having trouble with website members, and several other things that were pissing me off.
When I wrote those posts I was ready to throw in the towel because it seemed that nothing was going right.
Fast forward to now, several weeks later and things are getting back to normal. Adsense earnings are back on track, Kontera earnings are right up there with (and sometimes better than) Adsense, I won 2nd Place in Kontera’s Video Contest, members are back under control at the website, PayPal gave me back my money, and best of all, April 2008 was a record month for earnings, coming in at just a hair over $14,000.
I knew April would be a good month because of being forced to change subscription members from low-priced monthly fees (via PayPal) to a single, higher-priced flat-fee via Google Checkout. But what has been surprising to me is that the new Premium Member sign-up rate has remained almost constant even with the higher (one time) fee. Although I highly doubt that we will break our April earnings record it looks like May ‘08 will be another very good month - the best part is that I can say fuckyou PayPal, GoogleCheckout is more than happy to take my transaction fees (and Google Checkout fees are lower!) .. Although as usual i’ll be under the gun to make sure that Premium Members are getting value for their money. I’m working on a new contest as well as some site-upgrades so hopefully we can keep everyone happy.
I guess the old saying about making lemon aid when all you have is lemons is true.
Firefox Referral Tracking Issue Confirmed As “Bug”
This is a follow-up to the post I made March 21, Firefox Referrals A Waste Of Space?
The last response I received from Adsense Support was “I’ve escalated your issue to one of our account pecialists for further investigation. We’ll get back to you shortly.” That was on Monday, and I still have not heard back from them.
However, a few days after the issue with Firefox Referral tracking first appeared on March 19th, I sent an email to my “inside” contact at Google. To protect his identity, I will refer to him as “Mr. G”. I was beginning to think that Mr. G would not respond to my message, but to my surprise, his reply popped-up on my iPhone this morning just before lunch. In part, he said:
I was told that there does seem to be a bug which is currently being addressed. I’ll forward you any response I get about the solution they implement.
So based on this exclusive information from “Mr. G” - Google is aware of this issue, it is a “bug” and it is not caused by “invalid clicks” as I was originally led to believe in my first response from Adsense Support.
So the good news is that it is a bug, which means the good people at the GooglePlex should have it worked-out soon. The bad news is that it is a bug, and it will be a while before it gets fixed - meaning many publisher’s income will continue to suffer until then.
UPDATE: Within days of this post, Adsense fixed whatever the issue was, and Firefox conversions and earnings are now back to normal. This has been confirmed by many other webmasters at the DP Forums. Google never made any announcement about the problem.
Adsense Firefox Referrals A Waste Of Space ?
I’m sure that most readers of my blog know that my nickname is “The FireFox Referral King”. For those of you that don’t know, it’s because when GrownUpGeek.com was only a few months old I had extraordinary success with Adsense Firefox w/Google Toolbar referrals. I had such great success that Adsense published the site as an Adsense Success Story. They also went on to include GrownUpGeek.com as an example of how to implement Firefox referrals in their online help pages. Since then, the type of traffic coming to the website has changed resulting in lower referral earnings - dropping from $150ish per day back in 2006 down to around $40-$50 per day for Firefox conversions for the last year or so. Even though earnings aren’t as high as they were way back then, I’ve still been pretty happy with the $40ish/day steady income from Firefox referrals..
So when overnight my Firefox referral earnings drop from $40 down to $5 for 3 days in a row I immediately assume something is wrong - several other publishers have posted seeing the same drop of 80%-90% in referral earnings at DP Forums and in the Adsense Google Groups, so clearly something has changed.
I sent an email to Adsense Support yesterday asking about this sudden, unexplained drop in earnings, and in less than 24 hours I had my response, which in part says:
Thanks for your email. I understand you’re concerned that you haven’t
received any earnings for some of your referral conversions. After looking
into your account, I noticed that you have some conversions that our
monitoring system considered to be invalid.
The email then went on to explain how important it is for Adsense to monitor activity, and that I can “Rest assured that your account is still being properly credited for all referral conversions we consider to be valid, as stated in our Terms and conditions.”
Well, I can’t rest assured of anything when i see an overnight drop in conversions of over 90% - CLEARLY SOMETHING IS BROKEN. I replied to the apparently automated response asking for a human being to look into the problem, but I don’t expect I’ll get much of a response. If referral conversions aren’t back to normal or near normal in the next few days I’ll be forced to drop them and replace their prominently positioned spots with something else. I will continue to recommend Firefox to visitors as it’s a great product, but if Google doesn’t want the Toolbar conversions anymore, I will probably just send everyone to Mozilla.com for a toolbar-free Firefox download.
Anyone else notice a drop in Adsense Firefox conversions?
UPDATE: Monday, March 24: I got another response from Adsense Support indicating they have escalated the issue to an account specialist for further review.
UPDATE: Wednesday, March 26: This issue has been confirmed as a bug.
Google Says: Jump.. I say “My Privacy Policy Is Updated”
Last week Adsense updated their Terms of Service. You probably noticed the change because they forced you to acknowledge the updates when you logged-in to your Adsense account. The TOS was the page that you scanned-thru to find the “I accept” button at the bottom so you could hurry and get back to looking at your Adsense stats.
I actually did take the time to read the changes, but I’m not going to dissect them here because that’s not what my blog is about - To read a good comparison of the changes “before” and “after”, jump over to Jim Karter’s blog. He has taken the time to put together a complete before/after comparison in this post (be sure to thank him by dropping a comment).
Anyway, the one big change that a lot of Adsense publishers are talking about is the requirement by Google to have a privacy policy on your website that discloses your use of cookies and ‘web beacons’ - AND it says you must actually abide by that policy. Here is the exact wording from the new TOS:
You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your user’s browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.
Since I already had a privacy policy as required by Hotmail back when they decided I was a spammer, this was not a big deal. But now I had to update it, and actually make it available to visitors and members. As I was updating the policy it occurred to me that forcing Adsense publishers to have and abide by a policy like this is a very good idea. I think that Google is realizing that Adsense is partially due to the downfall of the internet by spawning so many millions of MFA websites and they’re attempting to root-out the krap. This is partially proven by all the grumbling and complaining I’ve seen in some of the webmaster forums. It’s funny how “real” website publishers don’t seem to mind all that much, but the “MFA’ers” are bitching and whining. I can’t wait to start seeing a Privacy Policy posted on all of those 1 or 2 page, worthless websites and it’s only a matter of time before we start to see all the of the “I got banned from Adsense for no reason” posts at DP Forums (and others) for the MFA’ers that choose to ignore or didnt bother to read the policy changes.
Updating my privacy policy wasn’t difficult, but it did take a few minutes of research. I added several things of my own, and borrowed a few ideas from some Google-owned websites. I also decided to place a link to the new policy that was visible on all pages, just in case Google decided to audit me (which I’m sure they’ll be doing at some point). Even though Premium Memberships are now generating far more income than Adsense - $4,500 vs less than $2,000 for Adsense in February ‘08, I still would not want to loose that Adsense income.
If you value your Adsense account like most of us do, you should probably take a few minutes to create or update your privacy policy. If you need help, there are several threads in the Adsense section of DP Forums. You can also have a look at my updated privacy policy. Feel free to copy & paste from it, just make sure you change the site name and other site-specific information. If you DO copy and paste from it or get any ideas from it for your new or updated privacy policy, please drop a comment.
