There has been a lot of talk lately about MFA or Made-for-Adsense sites. Google has taken a particularly hard stance on small players that are playing the arbitrage game and are adding little to-zero value to the end-user. Bigger sites like about.com and bizrate.com have long-ago mastered the game of MFA. I was surprised today to find that smaller players within the comparison shopping world are doing MFA. I was looking for luggage for a recent trip and did a search on MSN and was happy to see a comparison shopping engine show up, with a decent position.
Unfortunately, when I went to the actual site, I found this:
What really gets me to wonder about this and the comparison shopping industry in general is 1. what do their advertisers think when they see that they are spending money on a search and not even displaying their ads, and 2. I actually think that comparison shopping is a legit way to do PPC arbitrage, but obviously the click thru rate or the CPC is not high enough to justify showing merchant listings (meaning these publishers make more money from adsense then they do selling their own inventory), so the whole industry must not be what it’s cracked up to be.
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Google Does Us A Solid | o’neill media // Feb 14, 2007 at 10:03 am
[…] 9 out of 10 people have had horrible experiences with Google’s Content Network, primarily due to the MFA sites out there. There are some great ad buys to make on the content network if the buying process was more effective. I actually tried on a number of occasions to do individual site buys on the network and the CPM pricing they had was insane. So it’s great to see Google’s announcement today that they are allowing CPC purchases on individual sites. This will make them much more competitive against the upstarts like Adbrite that can really provide a solid ROI when used correctly. Sign up for the Beta list for this program now and reap the rewards before it gets saturated. […]
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