End of the road for Made-For-Adsense sites?

If you’re an Adsense publisher, you would likely have heard of the term “arbitrage”. Even if you haven’t you would at least have heard of how folks are driving traffic to their sites by advertising through the AdWords program.

“Arbitrage” is just a fancy word that describes the simplest of business principles : buy low and sell high. Adsense arbitrageurs pay Google and other search engines to send traffic to their websites by bidding on cheap key words. They keep the difference between what they paid for visitor traffic and how much they earn per click for the ads that visitors click on their websites.

In order to increase the likelihood of visitors clicking on the (higher paying) ads on their sites, many arbitrage sites place up to 3 blocks of Adsense ads (the maximum allowed) on pages with very little or no content at all. This means that the visitor has little choice but to click on an Adsense ad, since they cannot find the information that they were looking for. When arbitrage publishers do this, their sites fall into what is known as Made-For-Adsense sites.

This is such a great way to make money that arbitrageurs have practically taken over the Internet with their cheap, one page websites with no content except for ads. So why is arbitrage and MFAs considered bad?

• When visitors land on MFAs, they get frustrated that they can’t find the information that they need. In fact, they may have to click on multiple MFA ads before they actually find a genuine website with the information. All this unnecessary jumping around is what Google calls “poor user experience”
• Many unsuspecting Adsense publishers spend much of their time producing good quality content only to have their ad space populated by MFA ads that pay a measly one cent per click. Since big Adsense arbitrageurs invest huge amounts of money into the system, these ads find their way into every available ad space including those of hardworking Adsense publishers.

Now for the breaking news. Word has it that many of Adsense arbitrageurs have received emails from Google informing them that their “business model is not a good fit for AdSense and that their Adsense account will be disabled from June 1 onwards”.

This is a very positive move by Google, considering the millions of posts and thread on forums lamenting the parasitic nature of Adsense arbitrage. It remains to be seen exactly how many webmasters have received this email, but one thing is clear - Google has its eyes set on tackling this issue and when Google determines to do something, it WILL be done. Remember that many of Adsense arbitrageurs own and operate hundreds if not thousands of MFA sites. Just disabling one major arbitrageur’s account can mean thousands of MFA sites are suddenly cut off and redundant.

So how will this affect the Adsense program and you as an Adsense publisher? There seems to be 2 opposing views :

• As news of this spreads, many Adsense arbitrageurs will be pulling out of the program, leaving a big hole in the Google’s pocket, which then affects the payout to Adsense publishers like you and me. Although this might be true in the short term, the opposite might just as well happen
• With Adsense arbitrageurs and MFA sites out of the picture, genuine advertisers who left BECAUSE OF THEM will start to return. Many of them will bring their nice big budgets and will actively advertise in the content network. That means regular Adsense publishers can look forward to more an increase in Adsense income.

I believe the effects of June 1 will be positive. The whole arbitrage and MFA thing has made Adsense more complicated and frustrating than it has to be. I personally smell more money coming my way!

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