[This should have been put in the SEO/SEM category, but got put in Other by accident, since that is the default. ]

A big story started unfolding a couple of days ago about Adsense and how Smart Pricing works. It started at Webmaster World when one member got a phone call from Adsense and in the course of the conversation it was revealed that Smart Pricing is calculated not on a per site basis, but based on an entire account. It otherwords, if someone has more than one site with adsense on them all their sites can be affected because of just one of them.

The basic concept of Smart Pricing is not a bad idea. If an ad from ’someplace’ tends to not to convert into sales for the advertiser, then advertisers pay less for ads from ‘there’. The problems with it include how the conversions and being counted. From what I understand it depends for one thing upon whether or not an advertiser even using that feature of Adwords. Many do not. Many can’t really track conversions that well.

And now we find out that the ad from ’someplace’ may not refer to just a specific site, but any site in a person’s account. So if a person has one site that doensn’t convert well, this could lead to Smart Pricing having negative effect on how much they can make on their other sites too.

Jenstar, the moderator of the Adsense Forum at Webmaster World posted in her blog about this: One poorly converting site can “smart price” an entire AdSense accoun. Plus several other threads have popped up at WMW about this now too including this one:
Jenstar reveals data about Adsense Smart Pricing.

At the time of this writing we have not heard any official confirmation from Google about whether this is really true or not: smart pricing per site or per account.

In addition, since Adsense does not always have data to determine conversion rates accurately it has been speculated that CTR’s may sometimes be figured into the equation - leading many to suggest removing Adsense from pages with a low click through rate.

I would like for Adsense to deny or confirm this whole account thing and if its true I really think they should change that. Let it at least be figured on a per site basis - although ideally I’d like to see it handled on a per channel basis, but that may be too complicated.

Meanwhile, I will seriously consider removing Adsense from my pages with a low ctr - some months ago this was discussed WMW and I did remove Adsense from some pages. For other reasons it was hard to tell if it helped any, but at any rate it didn’t seem to hurt, and many posters at WMW seemed pretty convinced that it helped their sites.

I was reading the October issue of National Geographic last night. It has the saddest story about elephants in Thailand!

Jokia: was working in an illegal logging place, and forced to keep working while pregnant and then miscarried. She then refused to work and one of her handlers blinded her in one eye with a slingshot. As a response she ended up breaking the arm of her owner, who then shot her in her other eye, leaving her totally blind. Even then they forced her to work in chains - and then beat her when she ran into trees!

Luckily Jokia was rescued by a woman, Sangduen Chailert, who has rescued many animals and lets them live on a forest reserve in peace and freedom.

Apparently it is common for elephants to be trained and tamed by closing them up into a small cage and beating them and depriving them of food, water and sleep for days. Even sometimes stabbing their feet with nails!

In the article it also describes an elephant breaking a stick and using it with his trunk to scratch a hard to reach spot. At one time it was believed that only Homo sapiens could use tools - this has been disproved numerous times now with many species. Clearly these elephants and other tool users are intelligent beings! How can anyone justify treating them so badly? And then to be surprised when they do something violent to defend themselves?

Very sad - and what does it say about us - Homo sapiens? Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised that some of us are so cruel to other intelligent animals considering how we treat each other much of the time. Clearly something is wrong.

Sometimes I wonder if we are flawed in some fundamental way. Maybe our extinction is inevitable - if we are not capable of living more cooperatively with our own and other species - maybe we are doomed to disappear. And maybe that is ok. Maybe this universe doesn’t need our kind.

[Somewhat off topic - recently an infant gorilla in a Congo sanctuary was observed using tools also! Not many people have seen gorillas using tools, so this was a big discovery. Unfortunately I don't have a link to the original story, it was sent to me in an email - I can mail it to anyone if they are interested.]

I think one of the biggest things keeping me from achieving my goals is that it takes me too long to write anything. I’m too perfectionistic for one thing and it seems like just getting each word out is a painful process sometimes.

If I could write faster, I’d have a lot more content on my sites and be able to make a lot more money. I need to work on this but I’m not sure how. It seems like it comes so easy to some people.

One thing I thought I would try is to really try to write in a more casual, first person style. My background in science really nearly took that ability away from me. Everything had to be written extremely precisely and perfectly. Now its hard for me to just write without scrutinizing every little word.

I’m really going to try to write in this blog more often too - for practice in just writing.

WebmasterWorld is back online and functioning at its usual domain: http://www.webmasterworld.com ! Its been down for something like 6 days now, but sort of running at http://www.searchengineworld.com. Didn’t realize just how addicted I was to it until it was gone.

It was kind of nice over at searchengineworld.com for the past few days though. A smaller group of people and I found myself posting more than I usually do.

I feel bad for Brett having this happen to his site, but I’m sure it won’t cause any long term harm - with the site being as popular as it is.