Google Adsense and the Magic of the Long Tail

Lem Bingley at IT week blogs about the millions of blogs now running adsense that rarely, if ever break the $100 limit that Google requires before they cut you a check. This made sense in the early days of Adsense, since they were still mailing checks to everyone. It certainly isn’t cost effective for Google to mail out $0.10 checks all over the world. However, with electronic transfers now enabled, they’ve kept the limit the same. Even banks don’t make this much money of the float. If Yahoo or MSN really wanted to cut into the long tail of adsense, they would lower the minimum payout for electronic transfers to something more like $25/month. The other major complaint that I have with Adsense, is that I am not allowed to set a bid price on what ads can appear on my site. Google controls it. If they determine that my page rates $0.01 ads, that’s the ad they place. Granted, it is in their best interest as well as mine to put the ad most likely to recieve a legit click-through. However, it may not be in my best interest to clutter up my page with $0.01 advertisements. I should be able to set a minimum bid price for an ad to appear on my site. If I bid too high, then ads don’t show up, but since I’m not making much money anyway, I probably won’t care. My visitors will be more likely to come back and read something else I wrote. I am very much looking forward to good competition in this space. I’ve tried the Yahoo Beta program and it isn’t close yet. I hope it gets better soon.