AdMoolah News and Views

John Battelle thinks that it will be at least a year until MSN builds a syndicated ad network to compete with YPN and AdSense. John knows this space very well and he guess is probably as good as anyone’s. I am a little disappointed with this, I was hoping MSN would bring some more competition to YPN and AdSense sooner rather than later.

Update: The Blog Herald wonders if MSN has given up completely on an AdSense alternative.

I recently saw an announcement from a website that was starting an AdSense revenue sharing program. At these sites users can enter their AdSense publisher IDs into their profiles, and the site will display AdSense ads with the users id under certain conditions.

I knew Digital Point Forums was an AdSense revenue sharing site, but I wasn’t sure how many others were out there. I started searching and to my surprise there were quite a few of them! So I decided to put together a list of them here: AdSense Revenue Sharing Sites.

I’m sure there are many more that I missed. Feel free to email me at tlainevool [at] admoolah.com with any additions to the list and I’ll do my best to keep it update.

JenSense has noticed that the AdSense control panel reporting has changed slightly. There used to be two Advanced Reports links in the “Reports” section of the control panel, one for AdSense for Content and one for AdSense for Search. This has been changed to just one single Advanced Report page with a drop down to choose between Search and Content reports.

I suspect that this change was made because they are about to introduce an advanced report page for referrals. So, instead of going to three links for Search, Content and Referrals, they are trying to reduce the clutter a by have a single page with three drop downs. Let’s hope I’m right and they introduce this soon.

Google has quietly updated their referral program to have a 90 day time limit. If someone signs up for an AdSense account using one of your referral links, you will now only get the $100 bonus of they earn the $100 within 90 days. This makes the referral program, which had already been criticized of not paying out very much, even less attractive. Many new publisher will spend the first 90 days just experimenting with Google ads, so the chances of getting the bonus now seems slim.

The worst thing about this is that Google did not make any kind of official announcement. They simply updated the fine print on the referral button code page to reflect the new 90 day limit.

JenSense has additional details.

JenSense is reporting that Google is starting a beta program to experiment with rich media ads in its AdSense program. The rich media ads include interstitial ads, expanding ads and floating ads. Google started AdSense using the most unobtrusive ads possible – text ads. Over time they added graphical ads and then animated ads. Now they have gone whole hog and added these new rich media ads. The only thing left after this is pop-ups.

I find this very typical of Google. They have a basic philosophy about something – in this case, ads should be unobtrusive – and then they find they can make money from something and the philosophy shifts. In the latest version of the Our Philosophy page Google stated that “Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction.” On the What is Google AdSense page they state “Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant, unobtrusive Google ads”. I think that expanding ads, floating ads and interstitial ads are certainly a distraction and obtrusive. I guess Google will have to change their philosophy again when they roll these changes out on a larger scale. The same thing happened with their philosophy when they launched Google Talk.

There is no official word from Google on these new ads. We will have to wait and see whether they roll them out on a larger scale and if they eventually become available to all publishers. I’m sure other ad networks which currently offer rich media ads are worried that Google will start dominate in this field too, as they tend to do.

Search Engine Journal has published an article outlining YPN’s growth plans for the spring. I will go through the main points made in the article and comment on each one.

1. Improvements in Relevance : The ads that are shown by YPN are based upon what Yahoo calls its ‘matching expert’s. These ‘experts’ will be expanded to include :
* Contextual Engine : Targeting based upon the content of the page
* Ad Targeting : Publishers can “tag” their own site by defining their ad targeting category in the YPN admin
* User Data : Behavioral targeting or profiling (geographic & demographic)

This sounds exciting. Tagging sites is something AdSense users have been asking about for a long time. Premium AdSense publishers are allowed to do this currently.

The behavioral targeting or profiling is something that MSN has plans to do with its AdCenter. It will be interesting to see how well this works and if Google will eventually use this is well.

2. Wire Service : Offering publishers payment via direct deposit this Spring

This is good news and is something that AdSense currently offers. It will be nice to get the payments into the bank faster.

3. Expanding Invitations : Continuing on reviewing and approving thousands of high quality web publishers

4. International Rollout : Global expansion beyond the United States to English and non-English speaking countries

Publisher who have been waiting will be happy with this.

5. Yahoo Search Box : Publishers can add Yahoo Search to their site which will pay publishers a percentage of sponsored search revenue

Again, something that AdSense already has and YPN will be adding. Good to see.

6. Integration into Yahoo Answers : Yahoo may be offering its registered users the ability to earn revenue or points for contributing to Yahoo Answers and other user generated content offerings.

This is a fairly innovative step. JenSense has a good post on this.

Overall its good to see that YPN is moving forward with rolling out new features. With AdSense, YPN and AdCenter all competing, things should keep getting better for publishers.

The New York Times has an article about AdSense publishers titled Google’s Shadow Payroll Not Such a Secret Anymore. The article talks about how publishers are taking part in AdSense. The article features Digital Point’s Shawn Hogan who reveals the site makes about $10,000 a month from AdSense.

One interesting quote from the article is:

for every dollar the company brings in through AdSense and other places that distribute its ads, it pays roughly 78.5 cents back to sites like Digital Point that display the ads.

I believe they got these numbers from Google’s Third Quarter Fiscal 2005 Results, which shows Google Network revenue at $675 million, and traffic acquisition costs (the portion of revenues shared with Google’s partners) at $530 million. One thing to remember, however, is that large, premium publisher often make special deals with Google, and probably get a larger share of revenue then regular publishers. This 2004 article estimates that Google made a deal to pay an 85% revenue share for the to secure the AOL Europe deal. This puts the share that regular publishers get at somewhere below the 78.5% figure.

Found via JenSense.

AdSense has announced a new ‘since last payment’ reporting option. In the Reports – Overview tab there is a new option in the “View” dropdown that allows you to view all of your earning that you haven’t received yet. This will be very useful for publisher who earn under $100 a month and want to know how close they are to the magic payment amount.

There is a thread at Digital Point in which someone posted about what is apparantly a new feature in AdSense beta testing. The thread includes a screen shot of a tab called “My Client Center”. This seems like it may similar to the AdWords client center, which allows a third party agencies to handle multiple accounts from a single sign in.

JenSense has some more commentary.

Lately people have seemed to notice that the number of ads that are displayed in a single ad unit can vary. There have been threads on Digital Point Forums (and a second thread too) and Webmaster World about this. Many people are upset about units with fewer than normal ads in them because they feel the design of the site is compromised.

This is a feature that Google has had for at least four months, so I’m suspecting that all the complaints are because Google has been using them more often then they did in the past. Here is the initial description of this feature from the Inside AdSense blog.

We’ve updated AdSense to now vary the number of text ads that appear in a given ad unit. When we have a set of highly relevant and useful ads, we give them more of a presence in the ad unit by eliminating other ads. In some cases, if we determine a particular ad performs extremely well on a page, we’ll remove all other ads from the unit and show just this single ad

I have no reason to doubt Google when they say this feature, on the average, means more revenue for publishers. Remember, more money for publishers means more money for Google.

Whether or not the ads look ugly or not probably depends on the layout of a particular site. Sites that make the ads blend in using techniques like images beside the ads probably suffer the most. These ads usually look fine on sites where the ads are separated from content.