Google Ads are useless and don't work

When I tentatively put up my very first web page (preserved in all its horror here), I had this idea that I would never sully my site with advertising. When I decided to open a web-based forum, OSY, part of my selling point was that it wouldn’t have any ads at all. The web was still in its awkward growth phase back then, and some advertising was truly horrible (although not as horrible as it has become recently!) My web site was just a personal project, so ads weren’t necessary.

When I decided to put up a blog, my thoughts changed. Everyone else was getting money from ads, so why couldn’t I? The idea of Google ads really intrigued me. Text-only, non-intrusive, and—best of all—tailored automatically to my content! I’d just plug them in, slowly build up my readership, and watch as the money rolled in.

Well, as you can imagine, the result was nothing like this.

Money from views alone, apparently, is nonexistent—somewhere in the realm of billionths of pennies. You only get paid if people click on your ad links, and of course nobody with half a brain ever clicks on ad links. In the meantime, Google made my life difficult by requiring authentication on top of authentication. I had to wait for letters with secret codes in the mail, phone strange numbers and talk to even stranger robots, and repeat the process as often as Google felt necessary. No doubt they consider this necessary to prevent fraud and abuse of their ad system, but I wonder sometimes how hard it would be to make robots that can pick up a phone and call other robots. Then to make matters worse, Google only sends out a check (a paper check!) after the total reaches $100. There must be millions of blogs that never reach that point before the authors give up in despair. All those fractions of $100 are basically free money for Google—they certainly charge the advertisers right away—and they get to keep vacuuming them up, year after year.

The promise of context-appropriate advertising was equally a lie. Seeing what crazy ads Google would come up with for any given page was certainly humorous, but not useful in any way. They didn’t track with my blog at all. Maybe that’s asking too much, as my topics wander all over the place, but they were way off.

I thought maybe it was just me with my very modest blog that was having these problems, but then I heard Jeff Atwood talk about his adventure with Google ads on his Stack Overflow podcast, and he confirmed everything I thought. Stack Overflow was already a massive success, pulling in millions of page views a month, and yet the revenue from Google ads was practically zero. He very quickly decided to pull the Google ads and replace them with specific advertising that he procured himself.

What amazes me is that Google makes millions of dollars from this system that is so obviously broken. How can they get away with this?

Not that the alternatives are any better. The so-called “ad networks” that place banner ads on many places on the Internet are actually much, much worse. The ads run by these networks were never that great, but in the last year something horrifying has happened: two particular ads have completely taken over the entire network, the Internet equivalent of saturation bombing. I’m referring, of course, to the horrible cartoon people who cut belly fat with “This weird old tip”. Just seeing that makes me want to punch someone, and I’m not a violent person. Then there are the teeth-whitening ads utilizing a trick “Discovered by a mom”. Ironically, with a quick Google you can discover that both these “miracle” cures for belly fat and stained teeth are complete frauds—absolute wastes of time and money, and yet they are taking over the entire Internet. I saw one of these ads the other day on Hotmail—Hotmail! Is there no escape from this idiocy?

So I’m going to slowly replace all the Google ads on my site with ads for my own projects. I’ve started this at the top-left, and will continue until they are all gone. Maybe one day when I get more substantial traffic I might try and negotiate my own ad deals, but for now that’s just a pipe dream.