Just before the Fourth I was invited to fill in a “Google AdSense Publisher Happiness Survey”: You might have received an invite to fill one in too. I always try to find the time because I find that you can get interesting glimmers of what might be coming down the horizon by reading the questions closely, and it’s always fun to give feedback in a forum where they’re expecting it too.

There were three areas I thought were interesting. The first was a question asking about whether I participated in any other advertising networks, a list that was interesting as much for its omissions as its inclusions…

The question was “Have you ever sold advertising inventory through ad networks other than AdSense, or directly to advertisers?” Not a surprising question, but as someone who has worked with Kontera, Vibrant Media, Text Link Ads, CrispAds and others, I found it very interesting that their list of competitive sites was: Burst Media, Kanoodle, Right Media, Casale Media, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Tribal Fusion, Federated Media, Miva, Quigo and Industry Brains. Truth be told, I haven’t even heard of half of them.
More telling is that in addition to those I’ve already listed as omissions, I was also disappointed not to see b5media on the list either. They’re a smart competitor to Federated and while they may be a bit lower profile, it’s weird to see Quigo, say, and not b5.
Also, where’s BlogAds?
In some sense, this gives us a nice scorecard of what other networks are viewed as truly competition for the AdSense publisher.
The most interesting question to me, however, was the following:

I read this as asking whether I’d be interested as a publisher in having those AdSense blocks contain information other than just advertisements. A most interesting proposition, turning all those millions of AdSense blocks into a content syndication network! Would I be interested in having my own content appear in that manner? Maybe, but Google would have to come clean on the spectre of duplicate content and make very plain whether a subset of my content, as an AdSense content block, would be considered duplicate content for the search engine side of the business or not.
Finally, what Google survey would be complete without them asking if we are afraid of them or hate them? Sure enough…

It would sure be interesting to see the results of this sort of question on their surveys, especially when, like this one, it’s asked only of people who are already earning some revenue from partnership and provider programs like AdSense.
Everything here is my interpretation and “reading between the lines” of their survey questions. I could well be totally off-base. Do you have any other interpretations or thoughts on these questions? Please do share…