Googlecities Part 3

I kept up with the Googlecities/Googlepages story all day yesterday, and found a few more interesting aspects:

1. Threat to Gmail. Your subdomain on googlepages is your gmail address, so anyone that sees your page also has your gmail address. Gmail has a great spam filter, but why open up your users to this potential privacy problem?
2. Using Google to spam Google. I visited an SEO forum yesterday and found that one thing people are already talking about is using Googlepages for link development and for spam sites. Spammers have been registering gmail accounts such as low.mortgage@gmail.com so that they can have the domain low.mortgage.googlepages.com - which will likely be used solely as a page linking to other sites, or as a page with information taken from Wikipedia but with ads on the page. Since these pages are within the googlepages domain, Google will crawl them within a few hours, which will increase the ability of such sites to spam the index.
3. Advertising. If it’s a Google product just assume it will have ads. The Google model, which sadly has been adopted by too many promising new sites, is to create an ad free product, built up a loyal fan base and then slap ads on it. I guess the thinking is lead your users to believe that this isn’t about money, it’s just because we like you, and then after they’re hooked they won’t care about a few ads.
4. Click Fraud. IF Google does not choose to keep all advertising for itself, but instead offers the option to place AdSense ads on your Googlepage, Google will be increasing rather than decreasing its’ click fraud problem, which it is supposedly trying to get rid of. But, why would Google want to get rid of Click Fraud? Isn’t it sort of windfall for Google? Here’s how I understand it to work:
1. In a non click fraud situation, a publisher gets an AdSense account, and places AdSense ads on its site
2. The ads generate revenue for the publisher and Google (for this example I’ll use 50/50)
3. After the ads have generated $200 google pays the advertiser $100

BUT, suppose the publisher clicked on one of their own ads (violating AdSense TOS) at the time that they had made $10 then:

1. The revenue from the fraudulent click is returned to the advertiser
2. Google continues to display ads on the publishers site, costing them the opportunity of displaying actual revenue earning ads on their site
3. When the revenue from Ads reaches $200 Google tells the publisher - hey you weren’t actually making money for yourself just for us, because you violated the TOS a while back.
4. Google keeps the $200 less the amount from the one bad click, and the publisher gets nothing (actually the publisher looses $100 in opportunity costs)

So if you were Google, would you want to get rid of click fraud? Probably not. Of course Google could just slap ads on Googlepages and never even offer the opportunity for users to make money, but then they would be evil.

I’m sure that there is more, but this is being very well covered, and you don’t need to read my blog to know that.