Australia Post has certainly undergone oodles of change within the past decade.

Their shops have migrated from functional post offices into powerful retail outlets and bill paying stations.

They, like any other business must evolve within their environment in order to profit and survive. And seeing as email has recently impacted their profit from ordinary letters by AUD$57m, you can’t blame them. Actually, they seem to have positioned themselves well enough and early enough to not run out of puff any time soon.

As a customer wanting to send parcels/packages worldwide on a regular basis, I am becoming frustrated. A normal scenario is for 10+ customers to be in front of me, all of them paying paper bills with cash. Armed with an array of $50 notes, they present anything from land rate notices to child support statements. The kind of customer who doesn’t understand the internet and doesn’t want to. Not just elderly people either. Elderly people I can understand not wanting to change how they’ve always done things. However, there are plenty of young, active looking culpurates.

I usually want to send a package to Japan, or pickup something that I bought off Ebay. But I have become part of a minority of customers genuinely wanting to send or collect something against this army of bill-payers. I choose to pay my bills electronically (usually via BPAY) yet I’m penalised by those who refuse to evolve. Great for Australia Post as they’re making a fortune from it - it certainly isn’t in their interest to upset the applecart. With Ebay and online trading in general strongly gaining in numbers, senders and receivers are on the increase. Convenience and value for these senders and receivers is a growing market.

How about a separate queue for traditional postage services?

The internet is killing the traditional paper letter, yet creating new business for parcels and packages - the logistics industry.

One company I have found to be highly convenient is Pack and Send. Their office network is growing and you just cannot beat the convenience.

1. Park car at front of Pack & Send office
2. Shop assistant helps you with awkward item
3. Sign a form and pay them some money

Pricing is still considerably more than Australia Post, but so is the service level. Logistics prices in Australia are sure to level out in the coming years as we start sending and receiving more things thanks to the global network that the internet is.

What is a scraper site?

A scraper site is a web site that pulls content from another web site, almost always in an attempt to increase the value or relevance of the scraper site.

The vast majority of scraper sites do not have any original content of their own, i.e. 100% of what they display may be pulled from other web sites.

Adsense Scrapers

And as if this was not a bad enough moral crime to begin with, enter Adsense Scrapers.

Adsense Scrapers use traditional scraping techniques to fraudulently take a margin out of Google’s Adsense program. The common approach seems to be:

1. The scraper site throws a range of popular search phrases (easily found from tools like Wordtracker) at the Google API.
2. The Google API returns the highest ranking and most relevant web sites.
3. The scraper then scrapes content from the highest ranking site(s) to craft up its own targeted scraper web page.
4. The scraper then places low paying bid amounts for the newly crafted scraper page to display in the Adsense/Adwords network.
5. Uninformed, trusting users click on the low paying scraper ad (which costs the scraper site a small amount), taking the user to the crafted scraper site.
6. The user may then be likely to click on a relevant looking (and higher paying) Adsense ad.
7. The scraper then profits the margin between their income from the high paying ad they displayed and the low paying bid that brought them the user.

There is a reasonable chance that the user may still end up with the information they were looking for, but the path the user has taken has been at the expense of two parties:

• The webmaster or company who’s content was scraped, as this was traffic they may have otherwise received.
• The Adsense ad publishers who have paid for a clickthrough from what could not be classed as the most reliable and legitimate of referers. Many of these clicks could be from confused users looking for the most relevant way out of the cluttered or poorly structured scraper page.

Part of managing a strong internet marketing campaign is to do regular detective work and ensure that you aren’t in either of these boats. It could be costing you quite a large sum of money if you invest a reasonable amount in your Adsense campaign. And if you are new to Adsense, it could be robbing you of the decent results that you were hoping for and probably should be achieving.