Disaster to come? Adsense goes from second to first auction
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We explain why you will have lower revenue and poor ads with Adsense’s decision to go from second to first auction.
Google announced on October 7, 2021 that Adsense will move from a second auction to a first auction system. The changes will be rolled out until the end of the year. This is a change that will both lower your Adsense income while being bombarded with mediocre ads when the current Adsense state of advertising leaves something to be desired. But why.
Advertising agencies like Adsense are managed by an auction system. In order for an advertiser’s ad to be selected for the keyword they are targeting, they are setting a price that will compete with other competing advertisers for the same keyword through an auction system. The highest price wins. The whole process is super-fast, and in fact, whether it is the publisher or the visitor who sees the ad, they don’t realize it.
This change from second to first auction will be just as automatic for the publisher and the rest of the ecosystem. But in the numbers, that will automatically lead to a drop in income. This is why when asked, will this change affect revenues, Google Adsense twists its ass and gives us a ready-made sentence: Due to the dynamic environment of auction systems, it is impossible for us to predict the impact of this new system for each AdSense publisher (Translation: Yes, you will lose money while we will earn much more).
And it is common sense to think that you are going to lose income. A second auction system means the ad is evaluated a second time to compete with other advertisers. With the first auction, the first advertiser directly wins the stake. It’s best to illustrate it with an example. An apple is auctioned for $ 1, the first auction offers $ 1.1, a second bidder, arriving a little late and breathless, says he is bidding for $ 1.2.
Under Adsense’s current system, the apple is sold for $ 1.2, while from now on, the auction at $ 1.1 automatically wins. Roughly speaking, Google Adsense is still slashing the prices of online advertising to increase its monopoly and we are already seeing this with a drop in revenues for some publishers as of October 2021.
Then Adsense tells us in its own words that the impact on revenue will be neutral. In the worst-case scenario, the drop in revenue will be significant, but Adsense relies on the fact that as the auctions are easier, there will be more ads and therefore the loss will be compensated. But what he’s not saying is that the quality of the ads will drop to hell.
Results ? Publishers will earn less and less and their sites will suffer more and more from the mediocre ads that no one wanted before.
