AdMoolah News and Views

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.

A month after Chitika angered publishers by drastically reducing payments after showing audited figures, they are having problems again. This time they have announced that their auditing for the month of November will be late by about two weeks. This also means that November payment will be about two weeks later than outline by their terms and conditions, which states a net-30 payment.

They also decided to announce this problem via their blog, instead of emailing publishers directly.

I’m sure many more publishers will be dropping Chitika because of these problems; if Chitika keeps this up they may not have any publishers left.

See more reaction at JenSense and Inside Online Advertising.

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.