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ForbiddenKnowledgeTV
Alexandra Bruce
June 7, 2015
According to a source who shall remain unnamed but who has friends who work for Google, the advertising service which Google
offers to publishers to pay them for ad space on their websites, called AdSense has cut the percentage it pays to ALL of its publishers, at least twice in the past two years.
Myself, I noticed these shifts, first in November 2013 and next in February 2015. This is not just alternative media publishers but
ALL “partners,” as they call us.
Both cuts resulted in overnight dramatic revenue declines and despite these cuts applying equally to all “partners”, the independent, alternative media are certainly suffering the worst, because we have no complementary revenue from print or television advertising, which is simply the way that most publications are funded.
The first time the earnings were cut, I was so overwhelmed with the care of my dying father, I didn’t have time to think or do anything about it. More recently, the cut was so drastic that I would have to shutter FKTV quickly or else become financially destroyed.
So I reached out to my subscribers, whose shocking kindness in donating has allowed me to keep publishing, while I test other means of subsidizing this publication – while also being clobbered by the absurd amount of extra work involved with single-handedly marketing the film I produced, the VOD of which was inadvertently released in the middle of this catastrophe, a couple of weeks ago.
So I’ve been forced to hire an assistant, while my earnings are reduced to 1/5th of what they’ve been for the past 5 years and which are barely enough to keep a roof over my head.
Google is demonstrably lying to me in my page view reports, on which their payments to me are based.
I can see this very easily, because my professional mass emailing company reports an average of 2X the page views MORE than Google does, on any given day – but the emailing company can ONLY report on newsletter-driven views – while for years, a trusworthy traffic reporting service has indicated that 3/4ths of my traffic has consistently derived from *outside of my mailing list*, mostly from Internet (Google) search results – which, themselves, dropped to a zero ranking, last summer, whereas for years, results for my site would often appear on the first page, if not as the very first result, for the right keyword.
The decline in search results corresponded to the first reports of the development (Beta testing?) of Google’s Orwellian “Knowledge Vault” – just the name, alone of which sounds like its trying to keep something locked up, with no room for expansion of information and knowledge!
I’ll let Luke Rudkowski, of WeAreChange describe what that is further, but if Google AdSense does not discriminate between stealing money from ALL of its publishers, then Google KnowlegeVault most certainly affects the search engine results of the alternative media the most negatively. (It’s a triple-pronged attack, in my case).
Search Engine results will no longer be based on popularity but on their degree of resemblance to data found in the CIA World Factbook, Wikipedia and the government policy du jour (I don’t know if anybody else remembers, in 2003, when Dick
Cheney was simply not googleable. You’d enter his name – and nothing related to him would show up in Google’s results!)
Large publishers with the time and money to sue Google are doing so, as speaking with them is impossible.
The reason why so many publishers subject themselves to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party of Google AdSense is simply because,
at least in the past, they paid much better than any other advertising service. Not any more. Is this some kind of “Final Looting”;
a precursor to a giant sucking sound, to which we will all be subject, if/when the dollar implodes? Or will we see the ad market open up, as a result of this tyranny? My affiliate, for one is looking into a somewhat convoluted but promising method for opening up advertising beyond Google, that will take a lot of work and time to develop…that’s the way things can go: Breakdowns can lead to breakthroughs
Back to Luke: I met him at ANARCHAPULCO 2015, where I took his fun Change Media Bootcamp class. In this video, posted on May 24th, he is totally freaking out out over his own sudden loss of income.
Luke makes a solid case that alternative news purveyors are being targeted disproportionately. Where he is opting to go a subscription or “membership” route, I am still experimenting with other ways to keep my publication free, so you’ll see different things coming and going from the fringes of my pages.
I’ll keep AdSense until they boot me out because my Joint Venture agreement is solely based on AdSense income, which has made things quite odd for my affiliate, who practically invented the banner ad…
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WeAreChange.org
Anarchapulco.com
Heal For Free Film: http://amzn.to/1K5eerV
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