I was just reading the continuing monthly soap opera saga that I like to call the AdSense pity party because in no way shape or form has AdSense, or Adwords for that matter, ever been intended to do anything except to increase Google's bottom line.

They don't want publishers to have control nor do they want advertisers to have control and they have always stated that it's supposed to be run by the intelligent algorithms designed to make everything work automatically without human intervention and they never give us those dials and knobs, or even show us the data backing up why they do what they do, so we stare at this black box webmaster welfare machine that can either spit out golden eggs or suddenly a couple of copper coins at the whims of the man behind the curtain who spins the dial on the wheel of (mis)fortune at random times.

Not only that, IMO they don't have the best interests of the publisher nor the advertiser at heart and do many things designed to keep the visitor off the destination website and on Google to maximize the amount being paid Google, the premium dollar, opposed to the oft discounted amounts the advertiser would pay on our respective sites.

How you might ask?

Simple examples are Cache pages, preview, snippets, which often answer the question before the searcher ever leaves Google's page leaving only Google adverts being seen in the first place, not AdSense on our respective sites.

More complex examples of how they're trying to put publishers out of business is local which while it makes sense because of the maps and navigation are decimated local directories and Panda tossed many in the toilet and the rest are battling to stay alive because paid directories, which Yahoo Directory was, are now considered the enemy by the spam team and being devalued and pushed aside although they were the hubs Google originally used to find sites on the web but I digress.

If you're naive enough to buy into Rich Data Formats then you're allowing them to scrape your reviews and other key data and put it on the search page such as Yelp results showing the rating along side each listing thus removing the need to go to Yelp as you scan a bunch of results with ratings alongside. Whether or not you all like Yelp or their kind of sites isn't the point so stay on topic as it's the aggressive way in which sites are being cannibalized to Google's whim as they want to be the final destination and are merely mining our sites for the data to create the ultimate destination and have more or less said so as it's a "better user experience" to not let the user off of THEIR (Google's) SITE - which unless you live under a rock or are just that naive can see they're trying to pave right over the very publishers helping them make money to do it in the first place.

I'm not grinding an axe here, I have no hidden agenda, I'm just telling you how I see it because while everyone is so busy focused on AdSense itself, the bigger picture is you and all your sites are ultimately at risk using this as a sole business model because it's fueling their economy to get to the end game which is to become most of your sites.

Don't get me wrong as I'm a big fan of what AdSense represents as many people has and continue to make a LOT of money from AdSense and those that did and for whatever reason can no longer do so have no voice and it's designed that way because for every site that goes up or down, another site will fill it's place and does.

THEY DO NOT CARE - YOU'RE A NUMBER IN AN INDEX BEING SERVED ADS BUT JUST ONE OF MILLIONS, STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT.

Now that I've gotten that rant out of my system, back to the advertising issues...

The problem is there is no great alternative out there so to stop this no-transparency predatory madness so the solution is kind of grim in that you find something close and try to get big advertisers to follow or maybe get some really bright people together and use crowd sourcing to fund it.

All of the alternatives I've seen focus heavily on the Advertiser and almost always treat the publisher like a second class citizen that can't be trusted, which many can't based on all the MFA and click rings, etc. but there has to be a solution to all this insanity that makes everyone happy and removes us, and the cash fueling the fire of our ultimate demise, out of the equation.

What I'd like to see, and it could even be done in AdSense is they were willing to wake up and realize we're just as much a customer as the advertiser, which removing a few million sites from AdSense would probably make happen.

How hard can it be to make AdWords and AdSense more transparent and give both ends the tools they need to satisfy their needs and not the global needs or a big corporation?

See, that's where the big rub comes in because allowing AdSense publishers to control things to their level of contentment would completely upset the apple cart in the first place by setting base prices limits the number of ads or truly targeting and filtering ads for content also cuts into their earnings.

It's not a matter of could they do it, it's easy to do, but it's not economically prudent for them although the amount of loyalty earned by all the publishers, even if it had a negative impact on earnings which is the prevailing thinking, would alleviate the stress and make people happy which isn't what I'm reading here, it's unhappy. Just knowing the hows and why's, knowing the size of the ad pool or percentage your site is eligible for, or some basic info that tells you it's your site quality, traffic quality, or what factors if any are causing the problem so it can be resolved.

Instead we sit here mostly in the dark wondering if we'll buy a yacht next month, pay the mortgage, or even afford a 6-pack of beer depending on where we end up on the wheel of (mis)fortune this month.

As I see it you could

a) stay the course and potentially let it feed the ultimate end game of being your site as soon as they figure out how to get copyright abolished or

b) find other alternatives willing to listen and adapt to meet the needs of the publishing masses and let the tail wag the advertising dog for a change because without our content there is no place to advertise, remember that

c) crowd source a new solution that meets all the needs of the advertisers and publishers.

or...

d) Hope that MS actually pulls a rabbit out of their Bing Adcenter hat but I don't expect it to be any better than YPN in execution and adoption.

Personally, we've all got so much invested in Google I'd just like to see AdSense finally so some of the things mentioned and a whole lot more but considering the length of time this has been going and nothing has really changed other than the AdSense interface, I really don't hold much hope for the kinds of things publishers want because we're just free content and not the holders of the AdWords checkbooks making us the necessary component they'd just as soon not have to deal with.

Cathartic rant over as I don't see any end to situation because both publishers and advertisers fear change more than anything so even if we built it they may not come for fear Google would stop sending them traffic if they ran a successful AdSense competitor.