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In the past I have been a bit hard on AdSense, stating how it cannibalizes publishing, but there are some up sides to Google's AdSense too. Many people talk about the ease of implementation, scalability, and lack of maintenance cost, but 4 more rarely talked about benefits are...

• Safety From Google Editors: Since AdSense is a Google product you never have to worry about internal Google quality rating guidelines calling an AdSense link a sneaky redirect (like they do with CJ links).
• Profit From Spam: If you have a pharmacy affiliate or payday loan site then many people will consider the site spam by default. But if you tastefully write an article about such topics and then just happen to have AdSense on the page you are not viewed as a spammer by the general web public - Google (and AdSense) are a ubiquitous part of the web.
• People Under-estimate Your Earnings: Many web publishers have published AdSense sites and made nothing. Thus if they see you publishing an AdSense site they may assume that your site earns nothing, and be less likely to clone your site and more willing to link at your site than they would be if your site appeared more commercially oriented.
• The Informational Bias of Organic Links:Information is generally considered more citation-worthy than pages that sell stuff. Thus if you monetize via AdSense you can get inbound links to the money making pages without having to buy links. With most commercial offers you are stuck building links to other related pages and hope that internal anchor text & domain authority lift the page's rankings.

Longterm from a business sustainability standpoint it is nice to have direct ad revenues not controlled by Google, but AdSense can make for some nice short-term cash flow.

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ESPN recently decided to stop selling remnant ad inventory via automated ad networks / exchanges.

"We're heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks," said Eric Johnson, executive vp, multimedia sales, ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales. Sources say that ESPN would like to rally support from other publishers behind this move and ultimately tamp down ad networks' growth. Turner's digital ad sales wing is rumored to be considering a similar move, though officials said no decisions are imminent.

The two logical options from there are

1. set a floor price on house content and show fewer ads to offer a better user experience
2. look at currently hot stories, key markets in the weeks and months ahead, and market positions where you are close to leading but do not yet dominate and advertise your own products and services
3. Advertise branded widgets that go on third party networks which help get your brand exposure on those as well. ESPN should have made an official NCAA bracket gadget rather than letting that traffic and branding and traffic go to Google
4. add interactive features to your own site which increase brand loyalty and reduce content creation costs...which end up making the ad networks a more viable offering for back-fill content
5. If the ad networks are too cheap buy out inventory on competing sites to further distance yourself from them as the market leader.

All of those strategies allow you to buy market-share in your vertical on the cheap. The more of your market you own the better you will be able to sell ads for. If ESPN was 60% of the sports market Nike would be required to buy ads with them, largely based on ESPN's terms. Part of being remarkable is about creating featured content, but an equally important piece is making sure you are branded as the leading source. There is no better place to market your content and ideas than your own site.

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Big news by Google. After announcing the DoubleClick acquisition (~ 60% of the display ad market), Google announced the launch of Ad Manager, a free ad management tool with built in yield optimization. Ad Manager allows you to sell direct ads, and then backfill with AdSense and/or any other ad networks you choose. Huge for Google for 5 reasons:

• minimizes the value and risk of competition from larger ad exchanges like Right Media, smaller start ups like the Rubicon project, and open source ad networks like OpenAds
• gives them yet another way to follow web users across the web to create a proprietary web graph based on usage data (along with Google Analytics, Feedburner, RSS Reader, iGoogle, AdSense, search accounts, Gmail, Google Talk, Youtube embeds, and Google Toolbars)
• allows them to spy on other ad networks such that they can quickly buy out the competition and/or clone any features from newer ad networks more profitable than their own
• this allows Google to establish more meaningful relationships with publishers, and help recruit publishers to the DoubleClick level once they get big enough
• Google has yet another way to spy on any competing web service (outside of ad networks) and be alerted to change before any competing networks

YouTube probably gets about as many pageviews as Google does. By aggressively running display ads on YouTube, Google could likely take that 60% marketshare to 75% in a matter of months. Add in the self-serve expanded network for smaller publishers, and they are well over 80% of the ad display market inside a year.

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WebmasterWorld has another thread about lowering AdSense prices.

When the economy is good and advertisers have robust ad budgets, an ad network might be willing to sell them whatever they are willing to buy. If the advertiser wants to overpay for some ads and associate that spend with branding then so be it. But when the economy slows down, the ad marketplace needs to separate the best ad inventory from the weakest ad inventory to protect the rates of their best ads.

From Google's perspective, search is the golden goose tied directly with conversions. Syndicated ads, which can lead to conversions, may often carry a premium price based on branding value. Here are some of the forces that might be lowering AdSense earnings

• Some brand advertisers cutting their ad budgets, trimming brand related ads before they cut direct response ads.
• Those brand ads being replaced by less trustworthy ads from smaller advertisers who bid less and are less likely to get clicked on.
• Google changing the clickable region of AdSense ad units.
• Google lowering the estimated value of content clicks to help protect the value of search clicks and shift more of their network spend toward search.

Given Google's market dominance over the contextual ad market there is virtually no floor to how low they can price AdSense ads on non-premium publishing partner websites.

I have one site where the ads are AGGRESSIVELY integrated into the content, where that site gets thousands of search driven visitors per day in a big money vertical. That site has a CPM rate which is roughly equal to what one to two clicks would cost if I had to buy that traffic from Google directly (rather than me arbitraging their organic search results then selling that traffic). Clearly there has to be a better way to monetize that site. The ad prices are so cheap that I would be the buyer if I had a higher value model in that space.

If you have been using AdSense as a business model now is a great time to create new revenue streams and test shifting from an AdSense ad seller to an AdSense ad buyer.

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Since Google largely tends to favor ranking informational websites over commercial websites, some authoritative blogs tend to rank for valuable queries based on posts they make in passing.

Even if you had no intent to monetize a post, it just became easier to monetize accidental rankings. If you use analytics to track your stats and notice that you start ranking for some good keywords you can use Triggit to embed links to merchant products directly in the text of your blog post.

Shoemoney created this quick video to show how Triggit works

Unlike the automated ad solutions like intellitxt or AdSense, these Triggit ads

• look like other regular links on the page (so they should get a high CTR)
• can easily be applied on a page by page level (so you do not have to clutter up every page to monetize the few pages that can make a lot of money)
• link to products recommended by the editor (to preserve editorial integrity)
• can link to merchants that pay via affiliate payout or CPC (offering multiple monetization models)
• allow you to keep your pages clean (and easy to link at) until they rank, then have you add monetization after you have a leading market position for related keywords

Triggit ads are easy to set up and should require little maintenance on the end user's side, but they are still a small start up, so if you start doing well with them make sure you remember which pages do well so you can keep monetizing the pages if the Triggit partnership stops working, and so you can track which pages you should try to monetize more aggressively and/or build links to.

As blended semi-editorial in content ad networks like these evolve, the distinction between optimization and spam blurs. And since Google has a similar product, it is going to be hard to view this in a negative light without looking hypocritical in the process. From Google's pay per action page:

Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher's page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher's recommendatory text: "Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today." (Mousing over the link will display "Ads by Google" to identify these as pay-per-action ads).

Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we've found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.

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As an advertiser and a publisher I have ad CTR data spanning hundreds of millions of impressions and about a million ad clicks across a wide array of verticals. One of my early opinions on contextual ads and search ads was that people are far more likely to click ads if they are desperate, stupid, or ignorant. While I was flamed for my opinion, this opinion has only been confirmed from talking to friends who have much more data than I do, and Dave Morgan from AOL also confirmed it.

Seth pointed to this post by Danah Boyd, which offers a hypothesis on who is clicking ads:

Based on what I've seen qualitatively, my hypothesis would be that heavy ad clickers are:

• More representative of lower income households than the average user.
• Less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).
• More likely to live outside of the major metro regions.
• More likely to be using [social networks] to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).

The problem with catering to the lowest common denominator is that the people who are clicking the ads

• have less of an ability to buy premium products
• are less likely to do follow on marketing for you to promote your products to other
• are a small minority of your visitors
• are driven away from your site when they click
• each day many ignorant users learn more about the web and click less ads
• the new users coming on the web replacing those who are learning about it are even poorer and less socially connected than those already on the network

In the next couple years there is going to be a major shift in online ad based business models where many publishers push themselves up the value chain. The trend for profitable publishing, is going to include the following aspects

• fewer ads
• ads with more information
• ads that look more like information
• ads tighter integrated into the content
• having a semi-porous brand which allows your free content to do your marketing for your paid content
• in many case selling ads that include personal endorsement, and ads for white label products or house products (often via subscription)

As more premium publishers shift from ad based models to selling white labeled and house products it is going to get harder to buy ads affordably on the clean parts of the web. And the trend has already started. If you look at some of the most popular investment sites you will see that many of them provide free offers for products that lead you into buying a subscription service.

If you are going to monetize your site from a small minority of your visitors it makes sense to build relationships with them and charge recurring if you can. If your only monetize 5% of your audience would rather have $50 a month from them or 50 cents?

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Contextual advertising makes it easy for people who are not good at selling but good at building an audience to profit from their traffic stream. But the traffic stream that contextual ads work best for are search referrals, especially since

• the contextual ad networks are extensions of the search ad networks

• regular visitors learn to ignore ads
• the contextual ads typically have little to no editorial pre-sell

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Amazon.com recently took ClickRiver, their contextual pay per click advertising service out of beta. I am sure there is a lot of gold to be had for information marketers.

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People Tolerate (and Expect) Ads:

As Google's ad network gets more efficient and Google controls more bits, almost everything in any commercial market is going to sell something, subsidize another commercial interest, or have ads on it. To appreciate how much this trend will grow, just read the comments on my post about using custom search engines. Many of the comments are insightful, but almost nobody appreciated that not having ads in your internal site search result was a value add for a commercial site.

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If you are an individual or a small company, serving some markets directly with a product may not be as scalable as selling ads. The best type of ads to sell are overpriced CPM brand ads, but if you are in a high value niche you can also do well with affiliate offers and AdSense ads.

Most informational websites are monetized via selling ads. The most profitable ad any site can sell is an ad for itself, because there is already user trust and perception of control built directly into a person buying from the same trusted brand. If you don't believe that theory, track affiliate conversion rates while having a lead form on your site vs a lead form on a third party site. The on-site lead form will typically outperform a third party lead form sometimes by a factor of 2 or more.

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Traditional Publishers Are Wising Up to the Web

The WSJ posted an article about travel publishers wising up to the web, placing large chunks of their books online:

John Wiley & Sons, the publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., is offering an array of free travel tidbits and articles on the site of its Frommer's travel-book series. Not only can visitors to the site read blogs or listen to podcasts, they can plan and book trips -- generating commission revenue for frommers.com.

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Bit of Friday humor, but I couldn't help but laugh at the AdSense ads on 4spark.com.

Some real estate broker has an ad which is just his face smiling. It probably gets a lot of curiosity clicks, but I bet that smile wears off the day he starts tracking his ad spend.

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When you buy site targeted AdSense ads (or other CPM priced ads), there are easy ways publishers can inflate their pageviews and ad inventory. I listed a number of them here, but a few other common techniques are

• showing ads to bots (or running traffic bots against their site)

• refreshing pageviews
• framing external pages
• adding a forum to a website
• creating traffic exchanges and siphoning off credits
• creating ad units that offer no value, but cash in on naive advertisers

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SEL reports that Ask will soon roll out a contextual ad network, starting with their own premium branded sites:

The Ask contextual product will initially launch within IAC's own network of sites including Match.com, Ticketmaster, Evite and Citysearch and will then expand to trusted third party publishers. Individual publishers will most likely have to wait until next quarter to gain access to this contextual product.

What will they do with ticket scalpers? Currenty they are suing eBay's Stubhub.

Once Ask opens up their network to publishers, perhaps next quarter, they will allow you to match your ads for maximal earnings or maximal relevancy.

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Martinibuster started a great thread titled Anatomy of an EPC Collapse. One of the points mentioned in it was too much inventory.

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Jen noticed that Google's Kim Malone announced that in the next couple months AdWords will start displaying content targeted ad locations.

Google AdSense pays most publishers crumbs for their ad space. People who are running AdSense ads are willing to sell ads. And sites that have AdSense ads on them are probably actively managed.

Is there a better way to get a list of relevant pages to acquire links from than to run a content targeted AdSense ad campaign and ping those webmasters?

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I am still a fan of AdSense as a way of determining a baseline income potential for a site, but I don't see it as a long-term viable business model for most small publishers. Why?

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SEO Question: I was thinking about buying Google AdWords and AdSense ads or placing AdSense on my site. Will doing any of these increase my link count, Google rankings, or rankings in other search engines?

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If you create a site about information retrieval and see medical ads on it that might be a good sign there is a bunch of money in that market.

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WebmasterWorld has a thread about scaling AdSense earnings out with site size. The thesis being pushed is that site earnings is not a linear function tied to site size. For many sites that statement is true, but part of the reason it is true is that some webmasters do not leverage feedback their current site gives them.

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This post topic has the ability to quickly get me steamrolled and a lot of hate, but I think advertisement clickthrough rate is something well worth considering before creating any website that is monetized via pay per click ads.

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Many affiliate and AdSense sites make their goals so obvious that it likely hurts the linkability of their websites. Sometimes you can still get a fairly solid clickthrough rate on your ads while still having a site that is much easier to link at than the typical SpamSense site.

The few biggest keys I would suggest to increasing your income per pageview without hurting your linkability would be:

• Build decent topical authority and a good link profile before worrying about getting as much money as you can out of visitors. Links are a currency, and without them your other options and earnings potential are at best limited.

• Less ads on the homepage than the rest of the site - for many sites (even many entirely legitimate ones) the bulk of the link popularity flows in through the home page. In some cases that link popularity is self reinforcing to where people search for your main topic, find your site, and then link at it. Making a quick proper impression in those cases is huge. That link popularity makes your other pages more authoritative.
• Adding a search box is easy incremental income without increasing your perceived ad weight.
• Blending adlinks into navigation or near images can help improve CTR.
• A skyscraper ad on the left column where navigation usually is can pull a great CTR without making the whole site look spammy, so long as the site looks like its main goal is to push the ads.
• A skyscraper on the right hand column probably won't make much because that is a traditional ad location.
• If you control your page width it is easier to integrate high CTR ads than if you use fluid designs.
• If you put ads in the content area near the top of the page, if they go left and the content floats right around it that looks pretty spammy. If you float the content to the left side of the ads it can still get a decent CTR without looking anywhere near as spamtastic.

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I have not tested Google Adlinks on many of my sites much, but there are other sites that talk about me in threads.

I was sorta curious how Google picked "Aaron Wall SEO Book" as a link topic and wanted to see what ads they display for it.

I have so many relevancy points for those types of searches:

• I rank #1 for either phrase or them both together

• My conversion rate for those searches is amazing and I have Google Analytics enabled so they know how amazingly high the conversion rates are.
• If you search for either of those phrases (or the phrases together) I am at worst #2 on AdWords (am typically #1).
• I have AdSense content ads enabled with a wide variety of those types of terms in it and am nowhere near my daily budget on that ad campaign

and yet when I clicked that Aaron Wall SEO Book adlink I did not appear in the ad search results. I also clicked the SEO Inc. adlink and their ad was #9 for their own trademark name.

I realize to Google it is all just math, numbers, money-in-the-bank, yada, yada, but if it is wrong for competitors to use trademark terms in ad copy how wrong (and perhaps even a bit unethical really - since search engines want to push the bullshit ethics angle) is it for Google to create adlink searches using trademarked terms to drive them and potentially not list the trademark sites or any editorial search results?

Is that legitimate comparative advertising? What would Sony think if Google delivered Playstation adlinks that delivered ads for nothing but XBox games. What happens if Yahoo! sells a link named Google that leads to transexual porn ads? Where is the line drawn in the sand?

Is everyone that develops a legitimate brand forced into paying Google through the nose for Adlinks on their products or brands so they don't have Google flush their brand equity down the toilet?

I bet if you search around there are probably some interesting adlinks that are complete bait and switch on trademark terms. Is there any cases associated with the liability of doing that? Should there be?

I am a big believer in aggressive advertising, but is it deceptive for Google to use a trademark term in a link to drive a query to a bunch of ads that may have nothing to do with that topic?

How is this Google adlinks technique any better than typosquatting?

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Recently there was a biopic by the name of Walk the Line featuring Johnny Cash's life. The movie is so popular that the soundtrack and 2 of Johnny Cash's CDs are on the Amazon top 25 CDs list.

Johnny Cash's autobiography is a top 500 selling book on Amazon and yet the page had the following ads:

I thought AdSense was better at targeting than that? Especially for such currently commercially popular and in the news topics? Hmm.

That certainly shows Google still has a long way to go to improve their targeting and profits from contextual ads.

As a special bonus, if you like music you really ought to watch this video.

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So I have been doing a bit of surfing around recently and I have been seeing Ford Explorer AdSense ads everywhere.

Are they bidding on a list of stop words or the letters of the alphabet perhaps? At $8 a click? Or what is up with those ads being everywhere? I thought the US auto industry was screwed? While GM is in the hurt locker it doesn't seem Ford is fairing much better.

By Google delivering those damn Explorer ads that are so far off target they are teaching site visitors to ignore the ads, and may be costing themselves and publishers a lot more than they realize. If people learn to ignore textual ads then funding good content production is much harder. If people can't afford to make good content then Google is going to be full of garbage.

I know I have read a number of times about how Google did not like when people bought off topic links. Do they think they are doing the web a favor by putting those Explorer ads on exceptionally off target websites? Where does the targeting end? Why is it legitimate to publish AdSense ads so far off topic if off topic links are bad?

Of course it would be ironic if the ads were behavioral and typing this post meant Ford ads for the next 5 years for me.

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When I recently interviewed Matt Cutts he stated that many companies at the Web 2.0 conference were powered by AdSense. Kevin Burton hopes to take AdSense one step further, using it for angel funding for TailRank. Some others are already donating their AdSense.

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Recently when ads were disabled from Google AdWords they also were disabled from the content network, but that is no more.

Why do 'inactive for search' keywords remain active for content?

The Google AdWords system uses all the keywords in your Ad Group to help match your ads with relevant content network sites. In some cases, keywords which have proven ineffective when triggering your ad for search turn out to be very effective when triggering content impressions. In other cases the keyword is simply useful as context in helping the system determine the overall subject areas of your ads.

How they can have such a large network and then just randomly announce that effective now things are changed?

Some advertisers who do not log into their accounts in the next few days may come back from their holiday break to see a ton of formerly disabled overpriced content clicks killing their ROI.

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A while ago in SEM2.0 Andrew Goodman mentioned that Google was enabling separate content bids. JenSense just posted on the topic from the publisher perspective.

Google was intentionally slow to roll this feature out and makes the feature a bit hard to access, because they would prefer to automate the process using smart pricing and get you to buy as much advertising as you can afford.

Put another way, Google thinks that they algorithmically can determine the value of an ad better than you can estimate it. Having said all that, they do realize that sometimes the feeling of control will increase ad spend from some advanced advertisers, so...

Content bids let AdWords advertisers set one price when their ads run on search sites and a separate price when their ads run on content sites. If you find that you receive better business leads or a higher ROI from ads on content sites than on search sites (or vice versa), you can now bid more for one kind of site and less for the other. Content bids let you set the prices that are best for your own business.

I think a large part of the reason for the early success of Chitika has been that for certain types of content (like consumer electronics) image ads do have more value than the typical textual search ad.

If you have found underpriced content inventory look for this added control to cause more people to dip their toes in the water and drive up costs.

Not only does this new service allow you to bid differently for content clicks than search clicks, but it also allows you to buy content ads while opting out of search ads. In the past AdWords also allowed content only ads, but required content ads to be purchased on a CPM basis.

Now you can buy targeted content only ads and only pay when people click. Cheap branding opportunity I suspect. Perhaps with that type of distribution it makes sense to craft ugly highly graphical animated contextual ads that say DON'T CLICK HERE.

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There have been 3rd party javascripts that track adsense clicks out for a while, but no free ones to my knowledge that track clicks on Firefox. Until now.

This free script integrates with Google Analytics to allow you to track your adsense clicks.

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A friend of mine mentioned how the noise level in SEO forums has gone from around 95% to about 99%. I think it is largely due to a shift from content optimization to content creation (and remember that this is a site selling a book on optimization, so me saying this is not in any way to my benefit).

Here is why there is a large shift from optimization to creation

• The ease which content can be published: It took me less than 2 hours to teach my mom Blogger, Bloglines, rss, xml, etc. She now blogs every day.

• the ease in which content can be commented on and improved in quality
• the casual nature in which links flow toward real content
• the massive increase in the number of channels and quantity of information makes us more inclined to look for topical guides to navigate the information space
• the ease with which content can be monetized has greatly increased. AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Chitika, new Amazon Product Previews, affiliate programs, link selling, direct ads, donations, (soon enough Google Wallet for microcontent), etc.
• contextual ad programs teach the content publishers to blend links, which has the net effect of...
  • short term increase in revenues for small publishers

  • until users trust links less
  • at which point in time users will be forced to go back to primary trusted sources (ie: one of the few names they trust in the field or a general search engine like Google)
• it is getting increasingly expensive to find quality link inventory that works in Google to promote non content sites, and margins are slimming for many of those creating sites in hyper competitive fields
• the algorithms are getting harder for people new to the field to manipulate
• around half of all search queries are unique. most hollow spam sites focus on the top bits whereas natural published information easily captures the longer queries / tail of search
• duplicate content filters are aggressively killing off many product catalog and empty shell affiliate sites
• as more real / useful content is created those duplicate content and link filtering algorithms will only get better
• general purpose ecommerce site owners will have the following options:
  • watching search referrals decrease until their AdWords spends increases

  • thickening up their sites to offer far more than a product catalog
  • switching to publishing content sites
• and the market dynamics for Google follow popular human behavior, even for branded terms or keyword spaces primarily created by single individuals
  • the term SEO Book had 0 advertisers and about 0 search volume when I launched this site

  • this site got fairly popular
  • SEO Book is now one of my most expensive keyword phrases

As long as it is original, topical, and structured in a non wild card replace fashion content picks up search traffic and helps build an audience.

I am not trying to say that optimization is in any way dead, just that the optimization process places far more weight on content volume and social integration than it did a year or two ago.

The efficiencies Google are adding to the market will kill off many unbranded or inefficient businesses. One of my clients has an empty shell product site and does no follow up marketing with the buyers. I can't help but think that there needs to be some major changes in that business or in 3 to 6 months we won't be able to compete on the algorithmic or ppc front without me being very aggressive.

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Why chose Yahoo!?

• provide control to publishers - not a black box

• quality network
• competitive revenue opportunity (over 100,000 ad buyers)
• opportunity to integrate with Yahoo! content & Yahoo! users
  custmoer service & community

Size of Yahoo! Publishing beta?
approximately 2,000 publishers

they just launched ads in rss feeds

• open to all beat participants

• diversifies rev ops
• aligns w growing shift to rss
• supports movabletype and wordpress
• ads optimized to drive revenue

Yahoo! stated some think 5-6% of web users use rss but Yahoo! research showed it was closer to 30% of web users.

Jen asked if Yahoo! has anything similar to Google AdWords smart pricing?

• not needed for the following reasons

• allows advertisers to bid separately for the different content channels
• Yahoo! is more selective with partners

Jen asked when Yahoo! Publisher would be global
likely early 2006

plans for an affiliate program?
want to work to lower bar to make it easier for publishers to make money and work with Yahoo!...will allow affiliate program and will likely eventually support cpm pricing

wide range of topics on one site...how to be relevant?
can target ads at page level, directory level, or site level...can allow page or directory to override the site level targeting

going to change rev share percentage after beta?
absolutely not, but eventually may use traffic quality to adjust click price

Will Yahoo! offer behavioral targeting on contextual ads?
no nearterm plans, but may eventually

Rate of revshare / how compare to Google AdWords?
Yahoo! does not share the revshare %. more interested in being competitive in allow you to monetize.
revshare by publisher will vary over time

may eventually say you are in x range... to get in another range you may need to (get more traffic higher quality clicks etc)

Jen said targeting was no good at start...now better...is it where it needs to be?
still working to improve...pleased with speed at which it is being made better

Will Yahoo! offer a premium publisher program?
may give advertisers more control over who working with. but even small publisher may be premium if quality targeted traffic etc

How long will Yahoo! publisher in beta?
maybe toward end of q1

Jen asked plan on cpm ads?
may add cpm cpa. yahoo already does cpm on internal network

Will Overture drop the minimum bid?
unsure.

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Ads as content...works well for some. You know AdSense is out of hand when premade sites are selling on eBay.

Debt Consolidation:
Fun to hear a guy whine about his 2 sites in his sig file not outranking Forbes for debt consolidation
http://forums.seochat.com/t54393/s.html
because Forbes has an ad page. :(

I bet his debt consolidation lead generation sites are informational in nature :)

Some are discussing creating links wars
http://forums.seochat.com/t54378/s.html
as if that will help them rank. Good luck knocking out Forbes.com.

If Google dials up their weighting on large authority sites before Christmas maybe the solution is to buy ad pages on some of them. I bet there are some great underpriced ad links and advertisement pages if people would look hard enough.

Coolness:
Link to Jim Boykin's new tool...still a bad tool name though, IMHO.

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Great deal for advertisers. Some content sites are fairly mixed, with a limited number of pages being relevant for a particular product or business model.

Site targeting places your ads on individual sites in the Google content network. Site sections take that one step further by placing your ads on only one section or even one page of a site. If you sell soccer shoes, for instance, you might choose to advertise only on the sports section of a news site rather than placing ads across the entire site.

Select a site section by entering its URL in the AdWords site tool or in the 'Edit Sites and CPM' section of your account. If the full site is example.com, the section URL will take the form example.com/section. You may target individual pages by using the form example.com/section/page. Refer to the URL of the actual site to see how its sections are named. Source

If a site ranks where you want to be seen you can target ads at that specific page. Absolutely wonderful for marketing a product against an old competing one.

A while ago I also mentioned that if these page targeted ads were far underpriced some webmasters may be inclined to spam for authority sites to get the ads they place on them a bit more exposure. The ad market really is opening up :)

A great SEO tool that needs to be made is one that searches the search engines for desirable keyword terms and returns the result pages which offer AdSense ads on them.

I would imagine it also would not be hard to automate adding those pages to an AdWords account, and automate building a bit of link popularity for them.

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Part of the reason AdBrite was able to take off quickly was that it made buying ads an easy impulse purchase. It seems Google likes the idea, and on some quality AdSense publishing sites (like Ask The Builder) they are beta testing a new your ad here feature. When you click the advertise here link they bring up an AdWords page explaining how and why to advertise on the site.

The sign up process is smooth for new advertisers, but a bit sloppy for people who are already AdWords advertisers (who may not yet have experience running site targeted ads).

It will be interesting to see how granular the site targeting ads may become (ie: section targeting or page targeting). If they make them exceptionally granular you could buy ads on a somewhat decent ranking page on an authority site and then get them a few additional cheap spamish links to increase their ranking on that page or section and boost your ad exposure, while not being seen as associated with the spamming.

Yahoo! is beta testing their contextual ad service. MSN will also enter the contextual ad games soon, which will mean 3 companies will be fighting for publishers with their feature sets and payouts. Likely publishers as well as creative marketers / spammers should be able to do really well with that. It also means you will probably see less dog food for sale.

link from the brick man :)

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Google expanded their Google AdWords Site Exclusion tool to 500. But, to be honest, most advertisers are not tracking that granularly, and I doubt many people are blocking anywhere near 100 sites. Yawn.

I think Google needs to give more control to AdSense publishers, allowing them to block keyword themes. A friend of mine recently created a site about video cards and on his video card comparison page he keeps getting ads for crap like Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, and various sports cards. What is up with that? Sure he hasn't got all the comparison pages indexed (as his site is new and that would be 45000 additional pages with lots of similar content to the individual card pages), but what would be wrong with letting him block a half dozen concepts instead of making him need to block 100's of sites?

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In the past I remember reading many comments about Yahoo! Shopping buying AdWords, but am unsure if anyone has ever really mentioned Google buying in on the Overture / Yahoo! Search Marketing network.

I recently saw an ad for Google Print on the Yahoo!s Publisher Network on SearchBlog.

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AdSense has some competition coming. News.com posts Yahoo to launch blog ad network:

Yahoo is planning to launch on Wednesday an ad network for small Web publishers intended to strengthen its hand against rival Google, a source familiar with the plan told CNET News.com.
...
Yahoo's new service will differ from Google in that it will add human editorial judgment to the selection of ads for content pages. In comparison, Google's service relies on technology.

There are many fronts they can beat Google on:

• open revenue sharing policies

• unlike AdSense, they could actually enforce some legitimate quality standards - which may be likely if they put a bit more human interaction into the system
• more flexible, offering XML feeds or customizable ads instead of making people use arbitrary ad blocks
• Allow advertisers to run various ad copy lengths.
• Allow advertisers to pick what sites they want their ads to appear on or block.
• Better reporting of where ads are being displayed.

It looks like some people are already testing the new network. Earlier Oilman mentioned the Yahoo! context ads on Women's Finance, and looking around, they also appeared on Mom's Budget. I wonder what sort of revenue sharing Yahoo! is offering.

Yahoo! quickly needs to expand their inventory before they lose their partnership with MSN to avoid becoming a second tier pay per click engine.

I looked around and a few of the search related blogs, like Jeremy Zawodny, JenSense, and SE Roundtable were also displaying ads. Some of the publishing partner ads looked a bit botched. The ones on SE Roundtable were frequently off topic and cut off. I mean, how compelling is this ad:

Contraxx by Ecteon
Providing premium contract...

I know that as a user I probably would not click that, if I was the site owner I would be angry for wasting my screen space on that, and if I was paying for that advertisment I would be angry about that ad wasting my money. Why not just use shorter ad copy instead of cutting it off?

How can Yahoo! even think those chopped up ads are useful? Didn't they do some sort of testing on the system? How can an editor think that above six word ad is anything other than complete garbage?

Some chopped ads may send the wrong branding message and work to destroy brand value. Not good, IMHO.

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A person going by the forum name of Critters offers tips to increase AdSense clickthrough rate. They show before and after layouts for what they have done.

The biggest change they did was show related images near their AdSense ads, stating that the ads helped grab the attention of more website visitors. In spite of moving the ads below the fold they increased the advertisement CTR by 300%.

To keep the images fresh some people randomize related images on their site. Here is a random image randomizer article and PHP code to randomize images & another image randomizer code.

While crazy images may get you more clicks, as stated by Newquestions:

That whole "Paris Hilton" - "look at my clothed dog" type concept. From my experience, people are prepared to click advertisements that are supported by whacky images. The more crazy, the better IMHO.

What about men in drag? Perhaps distasteful, but some women love this
sort of stuff, and perhaps they will click your advertisements to see more.

Critters states that the ads have to be related for it to work longterm:

Putting images next to ads that are NOT relevant to your sites content will only produce short term gains. Smart pricing will kick in and reduce the value of the ads.

Only place images next to ads that you know are matching what the visitor is on your site for (ads for cameras on a camera review site) and that the images match the ads (photos of cameras next to camera ads)

I believe some people have also been using search APIs or scraping some of the engines to grab relevant images, although that might have a few copyright issues associated with it.

As a bonus from that thread, if you hate that damn frog this is the site for you.

found from Abakus

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I do not currently display AdSense on this site for a few reasons, one of which is that it probably would not earn much since most people reading this site can distinguish ads from content.

Nathan Weinberg recently wrote AdSense Bad For Bloggers?, where he questions whether or not people can make money from AdSense using blogs.

I think he said his network gets about 1,000,000 monthly pageviews, but AdSense is not making him much money. Blogs about Google and MSN will get traffic, but the revenue streams might not be there since technologically savvy people are less likely to click ads.

One time I had a chat with a well known web guru, who stated that not all sites need to make money. Websites can act as a team.

If you have sites with a ton of authority and little revenue there are a few options:

• alienate your users by trying to force a revenue stream that does not exist and thus lose your social currency

• gather feedback and create a product or service that matches the desires of your site visitors
• leverage the social currency of that site to help build up a network with other high profit channels

You only need one or two strong channels to launch a network.

A few of the major blog networks have even added poker sites to their networks, and people still link through to their network not minding that they are helping to promote illegal gambling.

In Nathan's comments Richard offered a good tip for bloggers wanting to avoid the evil generic blog ads:

The biggest positive changes occured for me when I stopped using the word “BLOG” and I stopped getting the same boring ads for how to setup a free blog.

As an added bonus, Nathan mentioned that ProBlogger made a post about earning milestones, saying that he is making over $10,000 a month from AdSense on his network of around 20 blogs (most of which are low quality content spam IMHO and thus I don't want to link into his bad neighborhood, but the post is here:
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/07/12/earning-milestones/ )

If you look at his network (www.livingroom.org.au & breakingnewsblog.com) you can probably guess which ones are making money and create / market better channels on those topics that will make far more than he is. Digital camera reviews are huge for AdSense.

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So I had about a half million ad displays since I started the Google site targeted ads. Still no sales from it, but good market data.

The wider your keyword set is the better your chance of being able to lower your per click costs. Doing site targeting makes sense if you have rich business models or are trying to target niche low volume sites, but otherwise it can be far more expensive than large contextual keyword based ad sets.

Some of my term based contextual ads have an effective CPM of around 16 to 20 cents, but the site targeted ads have a $2 minimum price.

You can't know for sure if your site targeted ads are a completely accurate measure of traffic volume because:

• they are only going to show on some pages with lower earnings potential

• different sites and site formats are better at monitizing content
• your overall daily budget might be too low
• your CPM bid might be too low
• some sites use multiple ad units

Despite the above I believe many of the anomalies offset each other a good bit. It is interesting to see that the traffic volumes drop off logarithmically from site to site.

Digital Point gets amazing traffic. In a single day I had over 26,000 ad displays on Digital Point. Some of the smaller SEO forums only displayed a few hundred or few thousand ad displays.

Andrew Goodman sees CPM as eventually phasing out the CPC model:

Other than trying not to antagonize webmasters who have been making a living off AdSense, I can't think of very many reasons for Google keeping the old version of content targeting around. I think that very soon it will become evident that the old content program is merely being grandfathered for a set amount of time so as not to confuse or upset publishers and advertisers. Phasing out the old program will perhaps lead to a slackening of revenues, as with any painful economic transition. In this case, the transition can be boiled down to moving advertisers dollars from bad publishers to good ones. In the long run, that should strengthen the fundamentals of online advertising and attract more advertisers to the party.

although I don't see that happening anytime soon. What makes Google's business model so powerful is the extreme targeting and allowing small advertisers to participate. I can't see them wanting to outright punt on that anytime soon. The only way they will do that is if click fraud gets tons of exposure, or if the cost of policing the small sites outweighs the returns.

Even if the small sites are a break even proposition, keeping them in the AdSense system means:

• free exposure for the AdSense program

• Google gets to boast about their program being so much larger than any competing contextual ad network
• If Google's ads are on the page then some other network's contextual ads are not.

The smaller niche channels tend to have a slightly greater CTR than the larger more well known sites. People moved to search because it was so easily trackable and targeted, but the $2 minimum on branding ads will keep some people away from participating in the brand ads.

While people may not realize the value of the small niche sites I believe their traffic quality is higher than the more well known sites since they are harder to get to (read as: what leads get there may be more prequalified). I had decent clickthrough rates on many of the smaller SEO forums & blogs (some averaging about 2 to 3 cents per click), whereas the clickthrough rates on the larger & more established sites were typically much lower.

I (at least temporarily) ended my site targeted AdSense ad campaign a few days back because I think there are far more effective ways I could spend money to promote this site, but for some business models the site target ads probably make great sense.

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Yahoo! DMCA Policy:
bogus, removing sites without ANY sort of notification. They really ought to work on that. (from TW)

Bad Copywriting Advice:

You can also use copy from the site (no links), like the section where it says, "The only current SEO Book on the planet. Buy the industry standard #1 ranked SEO Book. What do the search engines think?" Etc.

Especially copy on this page:
http://www.seobook.com/buy-now.shtml

How can a copywriting professional offer such advice on an open forum?

Google AdSense Feedback:
Questions for AdSense...

• Why are many WAREZ sites use AdSense as a business model?

• Is it proper to use the AdSense spam report feature on WAREZ sites?
• What if Google ignores that feedback?
• Is Google telling webmasters that stealing is fine, and they support fraud?
• Do they want people to run clickbots on their system to get them to actually accept feedback?
• Are clickbots and other scam software products the only way to force quality into the AdSense program?

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Porn:
web laws will change.

Yahoo! AdSense:
may be behavioral, not contextual

Excite:
founder interviewed (from TW) - talks about inefficient markets and timing.

Archiving Usability Reports:
the importance of archiving

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Why Does Google Lie to SEOs?
asks Stuntdubl

OptiLink:
Leslie Rhode created a new seo blog, and a new Mastering PageRank video. His OptiLink was one of the first SEO tools I bought and one of the few I ever found useful, although the advancing algorithms are making link analysis harder than it was a short time ago.

Say Cheese:
the demise of a brand - a Kodak moment.

Mirago's Context Stream:
new AdSense competitor spotted.

Spammy Directory Links:
Have still seen them working decent in Google, although I am sure that will eventually change.

About 3 months ago a friend launched a brand spanking new site on an expensive topic which already ranks in the top 30 for a well known short query. The site ranked there before being listed in DMOZ.

Other than a Yahoo! Directory link only a few links from on topic sites or sites that would be well trusted by an algorithm such as TrustRank.

Most of the links popularity comes from general directories. The site also has sitewide outbound links to a couple industry hub resources. Most other sites in the field are not well topically connected and are powered by fake hubs and the like.

Cory Rudl:
Ken McCarthy posted a in memory page with a 1 hour MP3 audio clip of Corey from February 2001, which is well worth a listen to anyone new to internet marketing.

Become.com:
Their search service now comes with a new search suggestion / keyword research tool. Similar to how Snap works, except instead of showing queries which start with your term it shows querries which contain your term. from TW

PPC:
MarketingSherpa best practices - How Autobytel Ramped Up to 150,000 PPC Search Campaigns : 5 Best Practices in Campaign Management. from GotAds

Fear, Greed, & Social Software:
article by Ross Mayfield

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Not something Google has mentioned (at least that I know of), but Robert Clough took a screenshot of AdSense ads on Search Engine Guide, which looks like there is an eBay favicon next to the eBay listing.

Luckily I already created an annoyingly bright favicon file which is ready and waiting to be used :)

Graphic text ads. hmm. To me it seems like it would make sense for Google to make ads on other sites look different than ads on Google to keep people clicking away at the Google.com ads for as long as they possibly can.

The more graphical Google makes ads on other sites the longer it will be before people become blind to text ads.

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The purist will hate the ads, but if RSS is going to transition from early adopter to mainstream it will need to pay for itself. The two options are that the RSS post is a summary that brings visitor to your site to see ads or you place ads in your feed. Google wants ads in your feed.

Google, wanting more ad inventory, has opened up Google AdSense for feeds (of course, BETA).

You are supposed to have at least 100 subscribers to sign up to the new AdSense for feeds program.

It's kinda funny how Google determines how feeds are supposed to work so that they justify creating more ad space, for better usability for the user of course ;)

Syndicate the full text of your articles. The more content that is available in a site’s feed, the better the user experience, and the more likely people are to subscribe your feed. If you can’t put the full text of your articles in your feed, then in addition to the headline of each article, include as informative a snippet as possible of the article’s text.

Typically most people do not view a feed until after they subscribed to it, so how does showing the full content of your post in your feed make people more likely to subscribe?

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Privacy:
Google Web Accelerator takes your data, and shares it with others?

Block Google Accelerator:
courtesy Fantomaster

Click Fraud:
search engines leave advertisers in the cold lurch. Lurch is a cool word.

Block that Channel:
Google AdSense allows channel blocking

Stop:
Collaborate and listen, Ice is back with his brand new edition SEO Inc, being cool like Vanilla Ice, sends out a cease and desist letter.

New SEO Tool:
SEO Browser

Audio Search:Sounds like Yahoo! may be first to market

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Easy to Compare:
Wal Mart & Google, except that Google has a strong brand.

Blogs:
more than a spit fight

Death of Newspapers:
The future of journalism

AdWords Spying:
GoogSpy looks scrapes hundreds of thousands of searches from Google to determine who is bidding on what terms. The idea is killer, but the implementation is a bit lacking. Link found from ThreadWatch.

Google AdSense in RSS:
alpha testing

RSS Spamming:
RSS Injector

Niche Tips:
an old WMW thread

Book:
Steven Berlin Johnson, one of my favorite authors, announced the release of Everything Bad Is Good for You

Boston:
Search Engine Meeting, reviewed

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Marketers rejoice...

Marketers using Google AdWords, rejoice! For ages, many of you have wanted the ability to pick and choose exactly where your ads would show up in Google AdSense contextual network. Now you're getting it.

Beginning today, some Google advertisers will have access to a new tool allowing them to select particular sites. Over the coming weeks, the scope will be expanded until all advertisers have access to the new feature, Google says.

The new tool will allow advertisers to enter the URL of a site they are interested in, then get back a list of similar sites, then let them select exactly the ones they wish to target. A new exclusion tool will also let them "go broad" and take everything, then selectively remove sites they wish to exclude.
...
The new system will work on a cost-per-impression basis, or CPM. Ads in the new system will compete against ads using CPC bidding, with the CPC price being multiplied against the clickthrough rate of those ads to come up with a pseudo-CPM rate to match against.

Huge for contextual advertising. Crap publishers will get lower earnings and strong publishers will be more adequately compensated for thier content.

Trusting advertisers to know where they would like to spend their ad dollars makes the market much more efficient. Good job Google!

The tool which shows related sites might be a handy tool for link builders looking to directly buy links or better understand what Google thinks is related to what.

Incidentally I just bought an airplane ticket for the Stansted ThreadWatch meeting. I will be flying on an AirBus plane, and my Gmail showed me an ad for this site. Figured I should mention when Gmail gets the ads right after I recently gave them a bunch of crap ;)

Here is the Google page describing the new targeting technology.

The new technology does not necissarily require ads to be contextually relevant, but the minimum CPM is $2 per thousand ad impressions.

The Wall Street Journal just reported that DoubleClick was just bought for 1.1 billion, and one has to guess this move by Google will undermine that value a bit.

With this branded advertising move and all of Google's non search offerings Google is more of an advertising company than a search company. Publishers can opt out of the Google branded ads if they do not want Google's ads competing with their own internal branded advertising sales.

Big branded comanies may be more likely to buy these branded ads than they were to bid on keywords.

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So I have been getting some of the Gmail feeds and ads recently. Hopefully I answered this question correctly or you the reader will call me dumb...

Bad Call #1:

Here is an example thread
title:

Question from Search Marketing Info

question:

Which internet search engine was co-founded by a math major who chose the name to imply a vast reach ?

Thanks in advance,
Chryss

answer:

Google was a mispelling for Googol, which means a 1 with a million
zeros behind it.

Larry Page founded it and Sergey Brin was his co founder.

and here was Google's contextually targeted Gmail ad:

Head Gasket Blown? - www.rxauto.com - Repair It Yourself Guaranteed ThermaGasket The Mechanics Choice

That is data stored on Google's servers and that is the best that they can target it? When you couple that in with all the AdSense spam sites and click fraud it really makes you wonder why Google assumes anybody would want that traffic.

Bad Call #2:

One of the default feeds was Engaget. Presumably because they run AdSense? Don't get me wrong here, its cool to help smaller publishers, but if you put Engaget in there you should put Gizmodo there also unless you want people to quetion you motives.

Placing random off target off topic crap I don't want in my email is being evil. At least the old Hotmail dating ads would occassionally show pictures of cute girls ;)

I know that I can unsubscribe from feeds, but I shouldn't have to opt out. Maybe off the start you could just promote Google News, Froogle, and your other portal pieces up there?

Bad Call #3:

Google actually places feeds in your spam folder. How stupid is it to place contextually relevant feeds near stuff that was deemed as being unwanted useless junk? What better way is there to turn us