AdMoolah News and Views

A new Trojan Horse that has hit the internet replaces AdSense ads with fake ones. Techshout.com is reporting on the problem. The ads look like real AdSense ads, right down to the “Ads by Google”.

The AdSense team validated the news saying, “We can confirm from the screenshots that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.”

The real victims of this Trojan Horse are the AdSense publishers, since they are the ones loosing money.

Found via JenSense.

Google has announced that a recording of yesterday’s Webinar is now available online.

Unfortunately it is only playable with Internet Explorer, not Firefox. Google should put some pressure on WebEx to fix that

Google has announced that the new themed holiday ads are appearing from now until December 26th.

I have seen them on one of my sites, and unfortunately they look pretty ugly because they use the default color scheme instead of the custom colors I had set up. Oh well, we’ll see how they perform.

AdSense had their webinar, which was focused on new features, this morning. Unlike previous webinars, participants were allowed to type in questions, instead of them taking questions via phone. This allowed them to field many more questions then they were previously.

They will be posting the presentation and a transcript including the question and answer session within 24 hours, so I will simply highlight some of thing that I found interesting.

They mentioned many new features and improvements they had been considering, including:

• More button formats for the referral program
• Individual sites has may have different OSASU landing pages
• Allowing “Advertise on this site” to appear on only certain ads
• Allowing text links for referrals
• Allowing publishers to choose fonts for ads
• Showing image ads in the preview tools

Other things mentioned that I found interesting included:

• Referral buttons do not affect smart pricing
• Referral buttons can be placed on non-content pages such as thank you and login pages.
• Publishers can put any contact information they want in the On-Site Advertiser Sign-Up site description. They can also mention other non-AdSense advertising opportunities. HTTP is not allowed on the page, but URLs can be included that can be cut-and-paste. This could be used to point to a site’s media kit.
• Publishers can direct potential advertisers to the On-Site Advertiser Sign-Up landing page via direct links or links in emails
• Referral buttons cannot be highlighted in any way. This would be considered enticing users to click.

I’ll post again once the official presentation and transcript is available from Google.

Eric Giguere has announced Best AdSense Resources of 2005 Poll. Go and vote for your favorite book, blog, case study, forum, personality, tool and website.

Digital Inspiration has release a new tool to preview ads for AdSense, YPN and Chitika. This is similar to Google’s AdSense preview tool that they have for Internet Explorer, but has some big advantages:

• Ads from AdSense, YPN and Chitika can all be previewed, including side-by-side comparisons of AdSense vs. YPN and AdSense vs. Chitika. This is very useful for seeing how the relevancy of ads compare across all three networks.
• The tool can show link unit ads and image ads
• They have a Firefox extension that will let you preview AdSense ads. I could never figure out why Google hasn’t done this themselves since they seem to be such big supporters of Firefox.

Read the Yahoo YPN, Chitika, AdSense Preview Tool announcement.

Found via Eric Giguere’s AdSense Blog

Not to be outdone by Google, Yahoo has sent some YPN publishers a gift as well. The gift is a stadium/picnic blanket and a greeting card that Yodels when opened. A good description of it can be found The Marketing Tools Review Blog.

As with the Google gift, there is no word on how much a publisher needs to earn before getting this gift.

Found via ProBlogger

I just found out AdMoolah’s blog is up for a award at KBCafe’s Blog Awards in the Best Webvertising Blog category. All the other blogs in that category are on my must read list, so I’m flattered just to be included in that list.

Google has been cracking down on websites which use trademarked terms like “Google” or “AdSense” in the domain name. They have been sending letters to publishers indicating that this is a TOS violation and that AdSense can no longer be used on the site.

Eric Giguere and a poster on WebmasterWorld have both reported getting letters.

This is important to keep in mind when choosing domain names. If you plan to run AdSense on a site, don’t use any of Google’s trademarks.

According to a New York Times article (registration required), Google is purchasing a 5% stake in AOL for one billions dollars. Here is my take on how this will affect the AdSense world.

One thing that will change is that Google will put special AOL ads on their web sites.

If a user searches on Google for a topic for which AOL has content – like information about Madonna – there will be a special section on the bottom right corner of the search results page with links to AOL.com. Technically, AOL will pay for those links, which will be identified as advertising, but Google will give AOL credits to pay for them as part of the deal. They will also carry AOL’s logo, the first time Google has agreed to place graphic ads on its search result pages.

The one effect I see this having may be a slight decrease in CTR for AdWords advertisers. The regular AdWords ads that are displayed on Google’s searches will have more competition on the screen, so they will be clicked less often. Advertisers may not be too happy about this.

The other slightly disturbing thing was this quote:

Google will also provide technical assistance so AOL can create Web pages that will appear more prominently in the search results list. But this assistance will not change computer formulas that determine the order in which pages are listed in Google’s search results.

If Google engineers, who know the “computer formulas” are giving technical assistance, this means that they will have an unfair advantage over other publishers in getting good results in the SERPs. Other publishers need to guess what SEO techniques work best on websites. If AOL knows what works best they will do better than everyone else.

To me this goes against Google’s philosophy of always providing the most “natural” results as possible in their search results.

More commentary at John Battelle’s Searchblog