AdMoolah News and Views

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.

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.

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.