This disgusts me or maybe it just makes me sad

I am always looking for new ways to monetize my sites. I have 0.5MM users visiting monthly (give or take) but only make $10k’s a year. Not really a great ratio (according to my friends). As such I was interested to see what the following company was doing by buying adsense on my site.

I clicked through and got the following landing page with modal overlay.

For those of you who can’t see the text says “I accept the Terms & Conditions for $9.99/mo billed to my cell until I cancel for Access to How To Guides” and is clearly placed in a very hard to read font over an orange background. This sucks. They also do a really good job of retargeting you back to the article you were interested in if you close the browser and navigate to their homepage. The form too is super well optimized (in my opinion). Whoever does this is very good at what they do. Interestingly it seems the Google search index considers them spam, they are barely in it at all:

I can totally see how (were I to do this on paper airplanes and cocktail recipes how I could get rich quick. There is no question I could game this to get a few % conversion and even if everyone cancelled after one month I’d make 10ks a month. I just feel it’s pretty immoral and now I am making money off this and my users are getting deceived through adsense. This isn’t adsense’s fault, how are they supposed to police this and even then it’s borderline whether this is illegal/in violation of their terms or not.

Last year I deselected all deceptive ads from adsense and I recently ran the numbers on those. I think I cost myself $20k in the last 12months. That being said even with the following settings I couldn’t block the above ad:

I have now made “howtotutorials.net” a blocked site for my ads and I don’t blame adsense at all. To be clear it’s the recurring billing and minimized terms I dislike. I think it’s ok to say “pay me XX through your cell to view your content”, that’s a pay wall and raising one of those is your decision as a webmaster. I just feel sad that so much of advertising on the internet is like this. We should be better. I need a new business model.

Comments

[Michaelseville]

Ah! haha well then I'm sure you're than familiar with the wickedfire crowd and their mentality.

Anyway, I just discovered your blog through the post you made on Facebook about your youtube views. I'm inspired, I have to say! I came over to learn a little more about how you went about building your sites and see if there's some things I could do with my own, which there most certainly is, so thank you.

[alexschultz]

totally agree Michael! Had to deal with a lot of that in my day job at Facebook and in my various panels at ASW and ASE over 2008-1010

[Michaelseville]

Alex if you think this is bad, you may want to read about the Acai Berry/Colon Cleanse/Teeth Whitening/College Loans rebill programs that were huge in 2009/2010. A lot of affiliates and networks making huge amounts of money, in some cases $M/week.

[Jfrstr]

Good on you Alex. If you piss in the soup long enough, eventually it will stop tasting like soup...