Google AdSense: publishing stats

So Fred Wilson has openly published Adsense statistics on his site, including analysis of them.

And then John Battelle complains about the lack of transparency in AdSense publishing - not least the restrictions on not using other contextual advertising networks, or even discussing its figures.

Not sure these people have thought it through, though.

I guess the reason Google doesn’t like discussion on AdSense at least involves the fact that, if the wider public learned which areas paid out most on clicks, then Google would be faced with a flood of low-quality websites on these areas - simply to display AdSense and try to cash-in on these clicks.

Google actually already has this problem - there are people in SEO who, in publishing across different topic areas, have already built sites to harvest higher paying AdSense clicks.

At least this is only a webmastering minority, though - and it’s already a problem for Google’s organic search, which so far as I can tell would rather push out the affiliate and advertising-only sites in lieu of the main content sites.

Now imagine if every two-penny webmaster then tried to flood the web with page, in an attempt to harvest the high-payout click categories?

I agree that there should be more flexibility in the AdSense publishing rules - but at the moment, AdWords is Google’s main source of income, and AdSense publishing accounted for one-third of revenue in their last stats release. So, naturally, they are being very protective.

As for Fred Wilson - he didn’t simply violate the Google TOS - he very publicly flaunted them. If he would rather not at least pretend to stay within the rules then it will be hard to be sympathetic if he’s kicked out for it.

Then again, I somehow doubt that a VC man is going to feel pain in losing $500 per year. But the smaller publishers may be the ones who ultimately suffer as a result of what is otherwise sheer arrogance on his part. But, hey, why should that concern Fred?