(Source) The following question arises: can advertisers be happy when publishers aren’t? And the fact that they have seen a significant decrease as far as earnings are concerned should make it clear that, at this point, publishers are anything but happy.
Naturally, publishers may just be more tempted than ever to explore other possibilities and under such circumstances it’s only a matter of time until advertisers will be affected as well. There is a fine line between a decision which can, as planned, have positive long-term results and one which can have devastating ones.
The problem here is that there aren’t a whole lot of alternatives for most publishers. If you’re looking for a way to earn money from your content there are few places to go to ensure that you match ads that are relevant to your content. No in the advertising business has a better way to match relevant ads with relevant content and that’s a huge deciding factor in determining how much money publishers will make from the advertising.
Sure, existing publishers who have been with AdSense for a long time may be spoiled into believing that they deserve more income and if they can get it somewhere else then I suspect that they would. My guess, they aren’t. I don’t see people flocking to Yahoo! Publisher Network, although it’s not a bad place to draw ad content from. But you’re not going to make as much money there as you will using Google ads. With smaller companies, the issue is the same – publishers just won’t make as much money.
That puts publishers in a quandary because they want to go somewhere else, disappointed that they’re aren’t making as much today as they were last year, but they can’t because most of them know that there is an associated cost with switching providers. Taking a pay cut from the company you’re working for is better than going somewhere else and working for less than even your pay cut. Finding the company that pays more is a risk that many publishers can’t face. And that’s good advertisers.
