This is a great question recently asked by one of our students/clients when we said our ususal introductory comments that “No we won’t spam you”, and “No we don’t use the click model on our sites”.
Let’s talk spam. We have never spammed our students/customers and we have an anti-spam policy. You are automatically signed up for our Newsletters that we hope you do not consider spam, and which you can opt out of.
When it comes to the click model, there actually is a little story behind this. When we first openned our Web site there were large additional costs to operating the site, it was not like today where you can lease a server for $10 a month in a huge Data Center. So we deployed the click model.
We chose Google and used Googles services. We ran ad’s on our site. The usual income was around $100/mo., not enough to get rich from, but enough to help offset the web hosting costs. Everything was fine for about a year, and then about 6 years ago we received this rude email (without any warning or interaction, I might add) from Google that stopped our Adwords account, and we were instructed to contact Google for more information. The link in that email went to a general information page that did nothing to explain why our service had been halted. After a call to Google, we were advised that they saw too many accesses to the ads from our very own IP address, which I remember saying: “That would be natural, right? So why not remove our IP address from the ‘count’?” I said this knowing that many of us here had actually clicked on Ads we were interested in. In fact, I personally bought something that was advertised on my own web site!
The response was both cold and without any further discussion. “No. Your account is suspended.”
“Wow”, I thought at the time. I wondered how many small businesses Google has “locked out” when it could be spreading itself deeper into the Web?
Naturally I removed all of the Google Ads from all 3 sites we run. And, we have never been back, nor do we intend to. Ironically, we constantly receive Google Adword emails asking that we install the service!
It was almost with pleasure that I installed the Google Chrome adblocker to my web browser several years later.
All that said, I truly wonder how big Google would really be if they tried a little harder with small businesses like ours.
Anyway, that is the story behind it. Thanks for the great question!