On Monday, 31 October 2011 01:48:26 UTC+11, John Coryat wrote: > > We should be given a choice of shutting the site down when the 25k limit > is reached or paying to keep it online.
You will have that choice. You can set a Maximum Billable Limit, which is the maximum amount you are willing to pay per day. If you exceed that limit on any given day, then the site will stop serving Maps for the rest of the day. You can set that limit to be $0 if you wish. > As stated by a previous poster, the cost of keeping the site up after the > threshold is far greater than the ad revenue generated by the site. > Shutting it down would be a negative to the users but the cost is so > prohibitive that it's the only option as far as I can tell. > > Forcing us to pay without any other options is going to be painful. > Writing a self monitoring system will require shutting off the maps before > the threshold is reached to ensure a safety limit. > > It does seem a bit short sighted for Google to force map publishers with > successful sites that run AdSense to shut down or be charged an excess of > what AdSense can earn. Exempting AdSense users from the limit would seem to > be a good business practice. Another option might be to charge these map > publishers the same rate that AdSense generates when the threshold is > exceeded making the sites revenue neutral for that overage and allowing > them to stay online instead of forcing a shutdown. > We looked into this, but even if we took 100% of Ad Unit revenue from sites, we would not generate enough revenue to cover the cost of serving those sites, given the average RPM of the Ad Unit. Plus it's a goal of the pricing not just to cover the costs of the affected sites, but also the costs of serving the sites that are not paying usage (ie. it's the revenue from the 0.35% of sites that are paying that secures the future of the service for the 99.65% of sites that are not). So if we were to offer a choice between showing the Ad Unit and paying, we would need to both increase the RPM of the Ad Unit somehow (eg. show more ads), and also force the Ad Unit on every site unless they opted to pay. I'm pretty confident such a policy would have generated several orders of magnitude more anger amongst the developer community than just asking the top 0.35% of sites (by map volume) to pay at the rates published. Not to mention the fact that the Ad Unit is not suitable for small maps, or any non-JS map (eg. Static, Flash, Street View Image, etc.). Many thanks, Thor. > > -John Coryat > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps JavaScript API v3" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-maps-js-api-v3/-/ZS_L-mHOBvsJ. To post to this group, send email to google-maps-js-api-v3@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-maps-js-api-v3+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3?hl=en.
