Thursday, November 9, 2006 at 10:10:26 AM
First of all, I'd like to thank the two individuals who pointed out the fact that Google just discontinued our custom search feature. The reason for this action by Google has to do with the fact that Search Kindly was a little too effective in raising money for charity. This caused one of
Google's silly little programs to conclude that we were engaging in fraudulent clicking, which is why there weren't any ads on the site for the past few days...and also why the search feature just stopped working last night. I swear that Google is the Matrix...where is Neo when you need him...
Search Kindly was able to generate money for our charity because we were a part of a very popular program that Google offers to damn-near anyone--it's called AdSense. AdSense is an agreement by the webmaster of a site and Google to allow Google to put their advertising network on a site and then have the two parties split the revenue that comes by users clicking on relevant ads.
CTR, or Click-Through-Rate, is something that measures the percentage of people that find the little ads interesting enough for them to want to click on it. In most cases, people just ignore advertising--hell, I do all the time. But every once in awhile, something seems to be a little relevant or kind of interesting and so we click. Well, that action results in the advertiser being charged some amount. In turn, Google splits that money with the website that hosted the ad. It's a really neat little system--until Google points the Fraud Finger at you, even if the site admins aren't guilty of any wrong doing.
Back to the CTR...a rough industry standard for click-
throughs is something like .5%. Maybe 2% for a really well-written blogger/review site. But anything much higher than that is going to raise some flags. And speaking of flags, Search Kindly must have looked like the
flippin' United Nations, because our CTR was a Whopping 38%. Which is why Google disabled our AdSense account.
But not to worry!
Even though Google has taken away all of the money that we made to date, that money is still going to be available for the
charities--I am going to personally honor all the goodwill and effort of our users. This might be kind of tough, being that I don't have a job and all, but it will all work out in the end. So please, please continue to use Search Kindly. I am looking at some alternative advertising networks and I will definitely have something in place by Saturday.
In the meantime, the
thermometer will continue to go up, it will just be at a much slower rate (being that I am paying for it now instead of Google) than before. The reason that the thermometer had been skyrocketing before was due to the fact that some of the click were worth like $10--yes, can you believe it? Advertisers bid on what they will pay for people to click on their ads and depending on what the search term is, the bidding wars can get really out of hand. The highest price of a click that I have heard of was $80. Incredible.
Ok, so that's a wrap right now...I need to get back to work and find some other way to help out those Ugandan orphans. If you have any
suggestions, please let me know.
