Peter, not sure if you knew this, but when you say:

Essentially, if you want to sell your website, and you've agreed to these terms, then Glam have first right of refusal on the sale! Nice.

The "right of refusal" in that contract just means that they get the chance to match the buyers' price and purchase the site themselves if they want. Much less insidious than trying to exclusively own tracking data generated on your own site, imo. :)

But the problem with first right of refusal is that many companies will not try to buy websites that are under such condition for fear of having that website bought out by a competing company, and potential legal issues with buying the site.

If I have first right of refusal on a site then I would probably buy about 99% of those because I know that there is another buyer at that price, and I could always buy it...test how well I could monetize it, and then if it does not work out as well as hoped try to flip it for a small profit or break even.

In aggregate it is an opportunity at near risk-free testing.

I looked at the Glam network at one point, as someone I encountered was using it happily, but as I read the fine print, too many things struck me, like the right of first refusal on purchase, and as best as I could tell the application itself was a binding ageeement - on my part, and I was signing up for a year of their traffic - whether or not it worked for me.

Too many things seemed one sided in the contract.

As it was 1am and I was tired when I was reading it, I decided not to proceed just then - and never felt inclined to go back.

Maybe its just b/c this is happening and the MSN issues seem far away. Seems like Google has way tooo much power. Any ideas on how to prop up MSN search and make them competitive? Perhaps another idea would be for Websites to create technology that can pull the refer source through or a plugin to a browser. Ugh....

This just increases the value of capturing data via your own on-site search. The referrer is only one way to discover what people are looking for, and it can be denied by individual surfers, or in this case by the use of Ajax. Get rid of Google custom search, and find a solution that gives you access to all of that query data whilst denying it to any over-mighty search engines.

If Google roll this out on a large scale, it's only a matter of time before many other engines follow suit. I don't see a flight to MSN or Yahoo! as a long-term alternative.

"Remember the changes to Adsense? Google introduced a new form of tracking code that can't be tracked by third party tools. However, that data is available within Google Analytics."

Hey Aaron, do you have a link that gives more info about that? I hadn't heard of that issue before.

Hi Matt
Long time no comment :)

The old AdSense code used to have a bunch of lines in it...but the new AdSense code has much fewer lines and can't easily be tracked by 3rd party tools like SiteSuperTracker...to use third party tools people have to know how to generate the old AdSense code.

For Analytics, Google gives people the opportunity to generate legacy code...but people have to use third party tools to do it with AdSense.

Matt,

I love AJAX, and I sincerely hope that this potential shift doesn't have ulterior motives.

But if it does, and you guys want to force people to use Google Analytics to get invaluable keyword data, then Google has gotten completely off track.

Want more analytics market share in a way you can be proud of? Then innovate - make it better than anything else out there. That's what you guys did with search, and it worked, right?

This seems to be inevitable, but also good for webmasters in the long run. It validates the data, first of all, which supports a market for it. The data is highly current, so as soon as the webmaster turns off third party access, that third party begins to suffer. How long will Glam last if webmasters decide en-masse that Glam is not a great choice?

Google has done the best job of trading value for data by offering Google Analytics. Still, webmasters are learning that all the fancy UI controls have finite value (mostly bundled into the convenience factor). As the market prices user data, Google will clearly have to keep adding value. I like that.

Of course Google knows this... hence knol and other research into hosting content on Google.

Funny to see this here today as I was just thinking of this topic after chatting with some data mining folks today.

It occurred to me that the response to the trend towards data commodification would be people bringing friction into the process. I envisioned folks creating scripts to make scraping their sites uneconomical (e.g. some kind of bot trap that used a lot of the scraper's server resources), but here we have two other approaches that are more clever.

Which goes back to my earlier post on data commodification and suggested takeaways - people building businesses around data treatment, verification and related value-adds will likely see a lot of growth here. I think Compete are moving in that direction and I wouldn't be surprised to see Spyfu upsell folks on an data consulting service.

Update: It appears the IT field/data warehousing business already sells data quality software and services. How long till that reaches the mktg dep't?

I think selling data is getting harder and harder though...Google and Microsoft are giving away a lot for free, and SEM Rush is an AMAZING service at the current pricepoint.

What are they thinking? They are not that great at search to begin with, so they should tone down their ego a bit. I'm in the process of writing a book titled "1,001 things I HATE about Google" and this is going to top the list.

for a company whose motto is "don't be evil", Google sure is BAD.