AdMoolah News and Views

I blogged about a new AdSense Sites feature yesterday, but after i posted, they yenaked the new feature off of the control panel. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but now it seems like they were probably having problems with it, and decided to roll the new feature back. They will be pushing the new feature out as soon as they have things fixed again. Here is what AdSenseAdvisor (the official AdSense spokesperson on forums) had to say about it:

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the delayed update – I’ve been trying to find out as much as I could about this situation in order to make sure I passed along accurate information to all of you.

We’re very happy you’re all so excited about the new Allowed Sites feature. Unfortunately, we had to temporarily roll back its release, but expect to see it in your accounts again soon. We hope that it helps alleviate many of the concerns publishers have had about code theft and click sabotage.

In the meantime, our engineers have confirmed that we deactivated any settings you made yesterday, so your ads will continue to monetize as normal on all sites.

Again, we’re sorry for the inconvenience and confusion, and appreciate your patience.

-ASA

I’ll be sure to update things as more information becomes available.

Here is another update from AdSenseAdvisor

ann, if you (or anyone else) are seeing strange AdSense performance that seems to correlate with this Allowed Sites release and withdrawl, you’re welcome to PM me your pub ID or account login and a description of the behavior, and I’ll be more than happy to escalate it to our engineers for investigation.

We want to make sure this temporary release didn’t leave any weird loose ends…

-ASA

AdSense has introduced “Allowed Sites” a new feature that allows publishers to specify which sites they are running AdSense on. Users can leave things the way they always have been, that is, allowing any site to run ads with their publisher ID, or publishers can specify a list of sites that their AdSense ads will appear on. If any ads with the publisher’s ID appear on any site not in that list, the impressions and click will not be counted for that site.

The new feature can be accessed by going to the “AdSense Setup” tab on the control panel and selecting “Allowed Sites”.

This is something that many publishers have been asking for for quite a while. One addition I’d like to see to this is a report that would list all the sites that have displayed ads with your AdSense ID that are not on the list. This would be good for two reasons, It might show some sites that are up to no good, and it would reassure publisher that all their sites have been listed properly.

Update: The Allowed Sites feature seems to be gone from my AdSense control panel. And my Firefox AdSense Notifier that was broken all day seems to be working again. It looks to me like Google rolled back some changes.

Another Update:There is now an AdSense help page for Allowed sites.

If you are a Text Link Ads affiliate, you probably received an email like the following yesterday. If you are not a Text Link Ads affiliate, I recommend you join now.

As a Text Link Ads affiliate we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve begun using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure our affiliate referral links. We encourage you to update your affiliate links using the following:

Homepage URL

–

http://tinyurl.com/xxxxxx

Starter Promo URL

–

http://tinyurl.com/xxxxxx

** Please note that our old affiliate urls will no longer work in one week so please update today. Thank you!

This is a very strange move for two reasons.

First, why would they go through tinyurl? Their original referal links were something like: http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=xxxxxx. These link aren’t that long. This new scheme only save 14 character per link. They could have easily saved another 4 character by removing the “www.” from the front of the referral URL, which means they only save 10 character by going through tinyurl. They could have saved another 2 characters by changing the “ref=” to “r=”. Now its only 8 character longer. Is that really a big deal?

Second, why make the old links expire? To me this will just piss off a lot of affiliates who now have to go and change all of their links. The cynic in me is thinking that Text Link Ads is counting on the fact that many of the links won’t get updated, and therefore TLA will no longer have to pay out affiliate percentages on those links?

Text Link Ads usually seems like they are a pretty good organization, but this email completely baffled me.

Darren at ProBlogger has posted about a new AdSense Online Advisory Council that some AdSense publisher have been asked to join. This council will be made up of publishers who will be able to provide feedback to Google and help test out new products. Of course, everything that the members of this council get to know about will be confidential.

It would be interesting to know what the qualifications for membership are. The invitation email starts out with “Congratulations on your success with the AdSense program. Given your extensive experience with AdSense, I’m happy to invite you to join AdSense’s Online Advisory Council”. I wonder what kind of figures Google sees as a “success” and what it considers “extensive experience”. I would guess that Google wouldn’t simply say “anyone who earns more than $x per month and has been in the program for y months gets an invite”. I would think that they would look at other factors such as quality of traffic, and then pick a nice cross section of publishers of different sizes from different niches.

Overall I think it’s a good thing for Google to do. The more feedback they get from publishers the better. I just hope that they kep listen to all of the publishers out there.