AdMoolah News and Views

JenSense is reporting that Microsoft has revealed the name of their new contextual advertising program: ContentAds. She found the name in description of a session to be held at the MIX06 conference. Also revealed was that the program will begin this year.

Hot on the heels of finding out about Amazon’s beta test of an AdSense competitor, there is word that another contextual ad network is in the works. This one is called Turn.com and is headed by Jim Barnett, who was CEO of Altavista and was also a top exec at Overture. He is also currently chairman of the board at SideStep, Inc. a travel search engine.

He’s planning to launch a next-gen advertising network called Turn Inc. in the next several months. He has $10 million in venture funding, and some 16 PhDs in-house. The idea is that advanced search will target advertisements to users with a precision we’ve not yet seen.

Normally, if a start-up was trying to compete directly against Google, Yahoo, MSN and Amazon, I would say they were doomed. However, Given Jim Barnett’s history in this space, they might be worth keeping an eye on. Given the fact that we really know nothing about this venture yet, I guess we’ll have to wait and see. If they are quick about getting things going, as start-up tend to be, they may be able to beat Yahoo, MSN and Amazon out of beta though, giving them a little head start on some of the competition.

Found via John Battelle’s SearchBlog.

Something that is a frequent source of speculation on forums is why Google sometime uses “Ads by Goooooogle” instead of “Ads by Google”. They have now answered that question on the Inside AdSense blog.

[W]e thought “Ads by Goooooogle” would be a fun alternate version of “Ads by Google” for our AdSense ad units. They are both branding features we’ve tested, and we found that “Ads by Goooooogle” is often more memorable for users than “Ads by Google”, so you may notice either label appearing beside your ads at any given time.

So, there really is no reason for it.

Chris Beasley is talking about a new beta program that Amazon is starting that appears to be a new, direct competitor to AdSense. Amazon has been contacting some members of their associates program and asking them to join the beta test. This means there will soon be four major players, Google, Yahoo, MSN and Amazon competing for publishers. As I have always said I think this competition among them is great for publishers. Competition will force the ad networks to add more features and keep reasonable payouts.

Found via Eric Giguere

There is a new site, AdSenseBits, that is cataloguing emailed questions and answers from AdSense support. There is some discussion as to whether or not this violates the AdSense TOS on a Digital Point Forum thread. Hopefully everything will work out and this will become a valuable resource for AdSense publishers.

Update: AdSenseBits got an email from Google OKing the publishing of emails.

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.