Someone Needs To Stand Up

Okay, so my wife and I basically just have one main source of income and that source is my job as a Software Engineer. It's pays relatively well for the area that we live. It pays the bills and keeps a roof over our head and gas in the car. My wife does babysitting and paid blogging on the side so that we can have money for unexpected expenses like taking the cat the vet, fixing the car, or trips to the ER. Well, that paid blogging portion was doing great. She was pulling in over $900 dollars a month by blogging. It was great. The bills were getting paid and the stress on not having enough money had been eased. Then, the hammer hit the nail, and a big self-proclaimed bully came into the picture. That big bully is Google and their trusty (and ever-so-innocent-and-fair) PR system.

My wife was receiving that paid blogging income through a company called PayPerPost. In a nutshell, advertisers give PayPerPost a bunch of money. PayPerPost divies up the money into so many chunks of the same amount and then gives bloggers a chunk if they blog about that advertiser's product. There is a bit more work involved then just getting handed out money, but that is the gist of it. It's a great program and a wonderful opportunity for stay-at-home moms to supplement their income or for college students to earn rent money and still stay home. In addition, each blog has a Page Rank(PR). This PR is given out by Google. It's supposed to accurately measure the popularity of each site by giving is a number from 0 to 10. Advertisers through PPP usually want popular sites to have their advertisements. The amount a blogger can make for an advertisement is solely based on their Google PR. This dependence on PR has been in PPP since PPP's beginning, which is coming up to be nearly 2 years. However, PPP(PayPerPost) has a competitor, Google's Adsense.

Google's Adsense are those annoying links you see on almost every single website. Google gets paid by advertisers to subscribe to that program and Google gives a small fraction of that money to the website owner if someone clicks on those links. Well, as you can see, PPP is in direct competition with that. What usually happens when a big giant company has a competitor start to gain on them? Three things usually happen: The big company buys the small one, the big company comes out with something better, or the big company tries to kill the little company. When Google saw PPP was taking more and more money away from them, (like they need more money anyway), Google decided to go with option 3 using their PR Tool.

In an effort to "level the playing field and make the Internet fair", Google changed how they compute a page's PR. Now, if you do any paid blogging, your PR is automatically 0. No questions asked and no apologies given. When asked why they added this, Google comes out and says it has always been their policy and nothing has changed. Well, if it has always been their policy, why did they just now enforce that policy? I know why. Because PPP is a major competitor with AdSense. Now does that sound fair? Only if fair means unfair.

Google did say there is a way to get you PR back up. Just stop blogging for money. So in other words, you can get our support again when you stop using our competitor's product. Ya that's fair. And that goes right along with Google's motto: Do No Evil. Apparently, Google only follows that motto when someone plays by their rules. Once you step out of line, Google changes its motto to "All Gloves Are Off". Since when does Google call the shots on the web? Who are they and why do they have so much power? What is wrong with the average Joe making money by paid blogging? Advertisers try to sell their product on tv all the time through commercials. You don't see the FCC trying to shut those companies down or companies shooting each other over getting on tv. If Google wants a level playing field, they are doing it like they own the field. Anyone remember why the pc world was in an uproar when Microsoft packaged it's Internet Explorer into its Windows Operating System? Microsoft got sued for being a monopoly on webbrowsers and had to change their ways. Isn't this stunt by Google along those same lines? They want to have the only means of people making money on their websites. Well, I don't hear any stories of people suing Google over this crap, so I guess we have to do something else.

This is where the blogger world needs to stand up to the Google giant. I don't care how big they are, they need to be stopped. The biggest chance to stand up to them is right now before they succeed in killing their biggest competitor. Google needs to be stopped. The way to do that is taking Adsense off of your site and pushing back against Google. To push back, use PPP as a means to advertise for a product instead of Google's Adsense. I promise you, you will make more money with PPP then you ever will by have annoying Adsense ads on your site.

Google needs to have their godhood over the Internet taken away. The Internet has been around for a lot longer than Google has. They should not be allowed to rule it. Once one of Google's competitors is allowed to survive, then more companies will come that will have great products that will compete with Google and perhaps Google will have to come out with a better competing product in order to stay on top. Now, that entire process is what I call really leveling the playing field.