This conversation occurred during a 2-hour drive on the interstate, so rather than let the question lie, I pulled out my iPhone and Googled the question. It turns out that Craigslist does indeed charge for some postings — they charge for job listings in a handful of cities, and for apartment listings in New York. That’s it.They pay their expenses, and I’m sure they make a nice profit, but surely they could make a lot more than that.

Even if all they did was place a single unobtrusive Google AdSense ad on each page, they would reap a heckuva lot of money. They could make even more with some private paid advertising, affiliate marketing, and charging for more classifieds postings. Craigslist is one of the highest-traffic sites on the entire Internet; they could be raking in the dough.

So why don’t they?

“Users haven’t expressed an interest in seeing ads,” said Jim Buckmaster, according to an article in a NY Times blog post.

When an analyst wanted to know how Craigslist planned to maximize revenues, Buckmaster replied, “That definitely is not part of the equation.”

That’s just weird. Why would you not want to make money?

A couple of days ago, I saw my AdSense earnings shoot way up in a short time span.

On investigating, I found that a small site that usually gets only a few page views a day was suddenly getting hundreds of visits in a highly unusual surge of traffic. All — literally all — of the traffic was coming in via AOL search from one particular search phrase, which brought up an image on the site, which AOL displays as a a thumbnail above the normal search results. This was a search phrase that normally brings only a few visits per month. But the traffic was coming in from all different IP addresses, different hosts, from different parts of the country, and with the normal and expected distribution of operating systems and user-agents. And the CTR on the ads was around 5% — also perfectly within the normal range. It sure appeared to be real traffic from real people, but it was something like 1,000 times the usual amount of traffic to that site, in just 2 hours.

I panicked! I reported the unusual activity to Google, of course, using their form. (Which form, by the way, is difficult to find if you don’t have it bookmarked.)

But in addition to panicking and reporting, I also suspended the site. I unsuspended the site the next day, but removed the AdSense blocks from the page that was getting all the traffic.

When I finally heard back from Google, it sounded like they were considering the traffic to be legitimate, and the clicks and earnings are still showing in my account. They told me I could put my AdSense ads back on and that they would be “monitoring” things closely. But by then, the traffic surge had dropped to a trickle.

Either way — legitimate traffic or not — I think I overreacted by suspending the site. After all, if Google found those clicks to be invalid, they could cancel out 2,000 clicks or 20,000 clicks just as easily as they can cancel out 200, couldn’t they? And if the traffic and clicks were indeed legitimate, I may have just overreacted myself out of a few hundred dollars.

I think in the future, if and when I see any such unexpected traffic surges, I’ll go ahead and report it to Google, but otherwise take no action. If Google decides the clicks are invalid, well, they can’t point a finger at me, because I reported it. And if the clicks are valid, I get to keep the money.

I guess these people don’t really want to keep their AdSense accounts:

* Apologies to I Can Has Cheezburger? Warning: This site will suck you in like a black hole.

I’m not sure if this program is still in perpetual beta or if it’s in some sort of gamma, but Yahoo has a couple of fatal flaws in its implementation.

First, Yahoo does not permit the display of any other contextual advertising on the same page as a YPN ad. This means that publishers already using AdSense (or any other contextual advertising network) who want to give YPN a test run face an all-or-nothing proposition when it comes to using YPN, and many of them will choose nothing. If you use more than 1 ad block on a page, and you’re considering swapping out some of your Google AdSense ads for YPN ads to compare performance, you likely don’t want to remove all of your Google ads. Sure, you could use 2 YPN ads, and then on another page keep your 2 AdSense ads. But you might also have an AdSense block or link unit in the sitewide header or footer of your site, and you would have to remove that, change it to YPN, or use server-side programming to swap out the sitewide AdSense ad for a YPN ad on any page where you want to use YPN. That’s easy enough for someone who knows how, but completely beyond the technical skills of many successful AdSense publishers.

Yahoo loses points for this dumb requirement. Yahoo is doing nothing but sharply limiting the number of publishers who are even willing to consider trying YPN.

Second, and this is even worse, YPN’s program is limited to US-only. Yahoo’s TOS, which publishers have to agree to when joining the program, prohibits the display of YPN ads to any non-US site visitor. The World Wide Web is called that for a reason: it’s world-wide. There’s no quick or easy way for publishers to display YPN ads only to US visitors, and the methods that are available are not 100% effective.

Limiting your YPN ads to US visitors only involves the use of an IP database, which must be updated at least once a month, the use of server-side programming code to detect the visitor’s IP address and translate that to their country location, and then the use of more server-side programming code to show the YPN ads only if the visitor is in the US. And, for publishers who care about these things, yet more server-side programming code to display something else in place of the YPN ad to non-US visitors.

The publisher who goes to all this trouble to try YPN is engaging in an exercise in futility, because non-US web users frequently use proxy servers located in the US to surf US-based web sites. The publisher will, despite their best good-faith efforts, have some non-US visitors slip through the cracks and see YPN ads. And then the publisher stands to have his YPN account terminated by Yahoo for violating the YPN Terms of Service.

Yahoo’s decision to limit YPN to US visitors only is stupid enough on the face of it. But then placing the burden of screening out non-US visitors on the backs of the publishers is even more stupid. The geotargeting should be done by Yahoo, who must have software engineers and programmers on staff who are capable of impementing this type of thing. Even Yahoo’s own implemention would not be 100% effective, but Yahoo should also be capable of simply screening out clicks detected from non-US visitors — Yahoo would not charge the advertiser for the click, nor pay the publisher for the click, but the publisher would not be in danger of having his account terminated for failing to accomplish something that is impossible to accomplish.

I would like to try YPN, if for no other reason than that I don’t like having my ad income so heavily dependent on AdSense. But I’ll take a pass on YPN as it currently exists. If Yahoo ever adjusts their TOS to allow YPN and AdSense ads on the same page, and either lifts the US-only restriction or implements their own geotargeting, then I’ll probably give YPN a shot. Until then, it’s simply too much trouble, with too much risk, for unknown rewards.

But now that they’ve fixed it, they’ve broken something else. Two something elses, apparently.

First, when I load up a report grouped by channels, the channels used to be clickable — i.e., I could click on a channel to get a report specifically for that channel. Now, the channels are no longer clickable.

Second, when I load up a report, I get a pop-up error message while the report is loading that reads, “Error: e_report has no properties.” After I click “OK” the report loads just fine — although I guess it has no properties. Google is apparently concerned about this and thinks I should be too.

I guess it’s possible that Google only changed one thing, and the missing properties are the clickable channels. Or it might be 2 things. I don’t know, and I don’t care.

Dear Google,

I’d like my clickable channels back, please, and I could do without the warning about the e_report not having any properties.

Love,

Me

Commission Junction is one of the biggest and best-known (if not the biggest and best-known) of the affiliate networks out there.

So I just don’t understand why they can’t run a web site that works consistently. Over and over, every few days, the CJ website times out when trying to log in or run reports. Some days I can’t log in at all. I’ve contacted CJ’s support desk — all they tell me is to clear my cookies or restart my browser. Dammit, it’s not my cookies or my browser. I’m a reasonably savvy Internet user who has tried every possible thing I can do on my end, including visiting the site on a new browser that has never even been to the CJ site before.

It’s not confidence inspiring. It makes me wonder how much affiliate tracking isn’t being tracked, and how many affiliate commissions aren’t being committed.

Google’s AdSense program isn’t known for open communication with publishers, but at least Google puts a notice on their AdSense pages when they’re down for maintenance. When CJ had its reporting go out for about 2 weeks (over the holidays, no less!), they didn’t even put a notice on the site until at least 10 days into it.)