Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Since I'm asking, I'll add that I don't spend much time blocking ads, I may have 2 or 3 blocked, I haven't even looked for months.
Regardless, in my case, I have some sites that were built on a whim, and I really don't care what ads are on them, but I have some sites I poured my heart into, and I prefer legit advertisers.
The truth is that if they were the best payers then many of us would put up with the tackiness for the income, but we all know that they are really awfull payers as well as making the site look cheap.
For myself, image of the site is important. Therefore I would certainly block ads that were of no use to my visitors (MFA's). If they were the best payers then I may think differently, but as they aren't its a complete no brainer.
I do have a couple of other sites on my wife's adsense account that are sites I tinker with. There is no block list on that account. But having said that, the niches they are in haven't really been hit by the MFA locusts like my main site's niche has.
or more money from MFA
I think this is a purely academic discussion for if MFA were high paying they would be owned by idiots throwing away their money by bidding high and selling low, and would be called charity not MFA.
But to answer your question, I'll take the lower pay good quality advertisers which would also make me more money as my visitors embrace the ads and take to clicking them trusting me, Google and the advertiser more than they do right now.
the MFA's do pay the least
I'm not sure that's always the case.
But for the majority of MFA to exist they have to be paying you less per click than what they are getting from advertisers on their own pages.
Put all this together and you will see the winning combination heavily weighted for the MFA advertiser.
#4 Legitimate adservers NEVER get a glimpse of the run around sue type of sites because they are being paid millions of dollars for the ads from #2 which are for the most part identified with a .htm and not a .com. Only the adbuyers (#2) .com is showing so we can only block the adbuyer not the ad.
None of the big 3 is going to look at thousands of 'landing pages' for the content side. It would take too much valauable resouces costing too much money which would cut into the bottom line.
I block all the #2 Adbuyers I find BUT another one just replaces it when it no longer becomes profitable. These I believe are created by the MFAs themselves.
Do you really think the big 3 is interested in blocking good old example.example ads.com/lookatme.htm?
when that dies it reincarnates as:
me.example.ads.com/lookatme.htm
Finally the .com name is replaced by another and it is then used up in the same way.
Nope, to block them would represent a tremendous loss of revenue so it is left to us to waste our time blocking them out of existence while the big 3 lose no money knowing that another is already in the pipeline.
Disqusting.
Ann
Another reason why it's futile to make judgements based on the ads you are seeing is there are hundreds of other ads being shown that you the webmaster are not seeing, and may not ever see. Even the preview tool only shows you a sample of ads that could be showing. It's not a complete listing. That's why I say the average webmaster is guesstimating- they have access to a limited amount of data.
Returning to image or income, I think the ads are often in the image of the site visitor- and this can be based on click data or search keyword data. Based on what is being shown site wide on some sites, imo the ads are reacting to the keywords being used to enter the sites. And if my ads appeal to those who may want to buy an e-book then so be it.
I think biasing the ads to the visitor can sometimes create a discrepancy between the image of the site and that of the visitor. If you have a site on fine wine and your ads are pushing box wines, and your site visitors inclined to click on ads and convert love box wines, do you fire your most frequent clickers?
Otoh, grossly mismatched advertising doesn't fly. As a hypothetical example, suppose you have a site on Russian history and all the ads are about mail order brides?
[edited by: martinibuster at 6:09 am (utc) on Sep. 30, 2006]
the average webmaster is guesstimating- they have access to a limited amount of data.
Of course. That's why I review my click tracker logs every now and again. If a suspicious site gets a lot of clicks in that report, or shows up on multiple pages of my site, I take a look to see what's what.
Many people have reported improvements in eCPM after filtering out MFA's. It's certainly plausible, although the last time I experimented with emptying out my filter list I didn't see a dramatic difference either way, so IMO it's not necessarily proven. But I believe that a high-quality website ought to care about the quality of the ads it shows, and filter out those ads which are deceptive or simply a waste of the user's time. So I do and I do.
- dumb users click more than a few intellectual visitors being lost on your sites
- mfas seem to be a quite acceptable exit option for your visitors
to answer the original question: quality or mfa? hmm, i'd like 100% quality (is that art?), but then i'd probably earn nothing.
I don't go chasing MFA sites, waste of time.
What's better than to make my living with supporting important new ideas and technology important for the future of mankind?
I was several years a poor inventer. I know this situation from my own experience. Now my articles written about innovations are for some inventors the major source of new important bussines contacts.
Like on a quality* family oriented site they'd go for the image and on their MFA site(s) they'd go for the money.
Maybe I missed it.
*high, low, medium? I'll have mine well done sir! :)
