Kristin Johnson writes:

There’s no doubt AdWords are the great moneymaker, which we all thought Amazon.com’s Associates Program was, and EzineArticles’ high Google PR ranking makes this a TKO.

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Lance Winslow writes:

I believe you maybe losing writers due to the google ad word ads on the side bar. Here is why; lets say I write an article on flower arrangements or several on this subject? Then your side bar appears with all my competition on the interent which do “Flower Arangements” and sell stuff online. So I am writing an article to help my business and then all my advertising is on the side bar? Great!?! Now I have introduced lots of new clientele to my competition. Now then many ezines will pick it up and they do not have the side bar ads obviously so that is good, but on the search engines you may rank higher than my “Flower Arangement” website because your EzineArticle website is much more robust and you are better at web optimization than my little site, you see I sell flowers, I do not do websites? So we authors use your site to help our businesses and you are inadvertantly sending our clientele to our competition? So remind me why I should write more articles about my business and post them at your site? If I write 10-25 articles and you put them up then my customers come to the site page where I am the author page and you send them to my AD Word online competitors? Someone would have to have a big ego to keep posting articles and knowing their customers are being re-directed? Think about it. Why can’t the ad words be slightly off from the articles content? EzineArticles is winning, but if the authors lose they will stay with one-two-10 articles and never post more again.

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Hmmm, interesting perspective. You’re the first to mention it.

Pretty much every site that picks up an authors articles will have advertising alongside the articles, so we are no different in that respect. Ezine publishers who reprint them in their ezine will also have ads or competitor ads most likely nearby them as well.

The alternative is to remove the ads all together and and become fee-based, but I can just hear 90% of the authors who have never paid to promote their business become upset with us.

Perhaps the solution is to allow an author on our site to pay a fee on an annualized basis to remove the ads and/or to be able to advertise their own business in the same space. If it were easy to implement, we would have done this already, but it’s quite a programming job to pull that off. It’s still on our minds and it may also solve our need for increased revenues while giving authors who don’t want ads to appear alongside their articles.

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Lance Winslow writes:

That is a thought. If they pay in advance or you bill a credit card, it might be a choice? But it sounds like a lot of work and if no one else mentions it and all the competition does it too? Then there maybe no economic value to you at EzineArticles.com to change anything. Now then to be fair to the issue. You have introduced an alternative. Fee or Ads on the page, I believe there is a third alternative for the author; do not participate. And if no one complained no harm no foul, but for every complaint there are usually 20 others which were too polite and simply did not come back to buy another Big Mac, at least that was Ray Kroc’s believe if you read “Grinding it Out” which I think is back in print now. Another thought would be that the authors could also advertise there, but instead they traded brain for braun and sweat equity for actual costs of buying Google words. Now then to also be completely fair to the issue, if the author writes great articles then the reader will buy from them valuing the information.

So sweat equity in this case is only as good as the article, if you submit junk articles and too salesy or pre-trial close links to your website in the article, then you might turn off the reader and you lose anyway. So not so good writers should buy the google ad words and be on everyones article sight rather than writing articles, because it is easier. Unless one does not have a lot of money and in this case should only write articles if they are a good writer or can hire someone on staff to right or hire a PR firm to write, but then again from a cost perspective they might be better off to simply buy the key words. Either way Chris it appears you win. If they write you win, if they buy google words you win. For the author they win if they write good articles, if they write junk they will simply find the reader clicks out and then clicks on a key word. So from EzineArticles.com crappy articles which draw in the reader, are good, because the reader will click out to the competitor triggering an every so tiny google word commission on the click. Very interesting indeed. However to improve the integrity of the site for maximum distribution you need good articles drawing in more ezine editors, thus more author participation, thus more articles and growth, meanwhile you need some people clicking out due to volume you win. So it looks like you are going to continue to be successful and the system has checks and balances for self governance which makes your job easier. So all in all, you are correct, but it still is an interesting case study for thinking and understanding the entire dynamics of this business model.

I am just really happy to be on a winning site since you lead the field and the other competitors if you wish to call them that, are simply not in the same league as EzineArticles.com

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