Wednesday, Apr 18, 2007    Text size: 

Traffic Dude President Scott Rabinowitz told XBIZ that adult webmasters still can monetize their traffic through Google AdWords — it's Google's affiliate and partner sites that will no longer generate traffic for adult websites.

"Google is not alienating adult," Rabinowitz said, explaining that the search engine giant is instead allowing adult webmasters to profit only from traffic created from Google searches.

"It will affect large domain owners, but that's a small percentage of adult," Rabinowitz said. "It's a large impact on a small number of adult sites, but not a major impact on the adult industry as a whole."

If anything, he said, forcing adult webmasters to find alternate traffic monetization methods could benefit the industry; adult sponsor and affiliate programs or outside ad agencies will be the next best way to profit from their site traffic.

And there have always been ways to circumvent Google's AdSense program, according to adult webmaster Lolo, who runs several sites including GhettoWebmaster.com.

In order to even be considered by Google to qualify for AdSense, one would have to have a "large domain portfolio" with sites that generated type-in traffic of more than 750,000 page views per month, which Lolo said excludes most adult sites.

"It's a slick way for Google to make money off of adult while keeping its hands clean," Lolo told XBIZ.

By using third-party intermediary sites not affiliated with adult, webmasters can "park" their domain names and still profit from outside traffic.

Whether this method will become more policed in the future, Rabinowitz said, remains to be seen, but he acknowledges that there will always be a way to work around the system.

Either way, Google has given adult sites using AdSense until May 31 to terminate usage, and Rabinowitz said this is the time for webmasters to research options and make suitable arrangements for monetizing their Google-dropped traffic.