Context sensitive advertising makes people miss the point

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There’s no question that the advent of context sensitive advertising has wrought a lot of change in the last few years. People who were unable to monetize websites previously suddenly found a way. Others who would have no chance of competing online in prior years were suddenly able to buy scripts and become “webmasters overnight”. But the rush for gold has left a lot of people looking at the internet the wrong way.

The question is not “what can the internet do for you”, but rather “what can your website do for the internet?”

Building schlock websites may make you a few bucks for a while, but you’ll end up running into a brick wall, and for a few obvious reasons. If you make a website that has no intrinsic economic value, at some point, it will reach that value, whether you can inflate the stats for awhile.

Made for Adsense websites have had a great run in the last few years. The sites are very ugly, and don’t attract a ton of visitors on their own, but based on inefficiencies in the search engines, allowed webmasters to “scrape” their way to a living. As the spread of analytics software (mainly by Google) made it easier for people to figure out exactly what percentage of their traffic converted. With more power, the advertisers exerted more power over the amount they paid to advertisers. As a result, lower end no quality websites have a harder time getting paid then ever before.

As a result of getting paid less, makers of crap websites also start making less, so the overall trend is towards quality again. This phase is going on right now, IMHO. Coupled with an algo that demands a lot more quality metrics before and it appears that Google is working to fix the problem they created in a large part. They know that quality metrics come through statistically, and they’re finding more ways to figure out how it exists.

We’ll see how this trend continues in 2006, if it does at all.  I’m sticking to building quality websites, and I’m sure lots of other folks are too.

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