AdMoolah News and Views

There have been a lot of new advertising networks popping up in the last month or so. With many people complaining that AdSense isn’t doing as well for them as it used to, I think many publishers are ready to look for alternatives. Here is a quick overview of five networks that have been announced recently.

Performancing Partners Ad Network
This is a advertising network for blogs. Advertisers can buy ad spots on you blog on a monthly basis. Performancing has an “Auto Pricing” feature which determines the price of an ad based on your blogs statistics. These prices can be overridden by the blog owner. You can choose to place anywhere from 1 to 6 ads on your blog. When there are no ads to display, an ad for Performancing is shown. The good thing about about these Performancing ads is you get a 5% referral program for anyone who signs up through them. I have signed up for this program and am testing it on my blog right now (you can see ad on the the right sidebar). It takes 48 hours for the auto pricing to kick in, so I’m not sure what to expect yet.

Performancing pays 70% of the revenue to the blog owner. They also have a 5% lifetime referral bonus for any publishers or advertisers who sign up through your ad.

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Text Link Ads’ Feedvertising
Feedvertising allows you to insert text ads into your blog entries. The interesting thing about this is that it allows you to insert your own ads for free, or if you like to sign up for their advertising marketplace so advertisers can pay for ads. I have not yet used the Feedvertsing program, but I am considering trying it out. I like the fact the ads are unobtrusive and are clearly labeled as ads.

Feedvertising is free to use for your own ads. Publishers get 50% of revenue generated from the sales in the advertising marketplace. They also have a referral program which pays $25.00 for any referred visitor that results in a sale or gets accepted into the publisher program.

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Texsy
Texsy is an ad program that inserts ads into the text of web pages. Texsy underlines product names on your web sites and underlines them. When users hover over the underlined words, an ad pop up. The ads that are shown are from Amazon, Ebay and Shopping.com. Publishers must sign up for these affiliate programs for them to show up on web pages.

Texsy inserts its own ads into the publisher sites 20% of the time.

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AdQuick
This is a new advertising program that I don’t know much about. The web site does not provide much information, there is no Terms and Conditions page yet, the FAQ page is empty and they provide little information about how the program works. I’ve sent a message to them asking for more information. I’ll make a new post if I find anything significant.
Update: They now have a FAQ posted on the site, see: http://www.adquick.co.uk/faq.php. Still no T&C though, so I’m not signing up for now.

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ReviewMe
Review me is a new advertising program from Andy Hagans. Bloggers are paid to write reviews about an advertisers program. The review will have full disclosure that reviewer has been paid, and the review do not need to be positive. ReviewMe is not yet open to the public, but should be shortly.

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I’d love to hear comments from anyone who has experience with these networks.

Here is a list of the blogs that I consider essential reading for any web publisher. I tried to be selective and keep it to a reasonable size.

AdSense/PPC

JenSense – Making Sense of Contextual Advertising – Jennifer always has the latest scoop on AdSense and other ad programs.
Inside AdSense – Google official AdSense blog.
inside AdWords – Google official AdWords blog.
Yahoo! Publisher Network – Yahoo’s official YPN blog.
Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense – Eric Giguere always offers good advice on AdSense and other publisher related issues.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO Book.com – Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook (aff. link) offers great SEO tidbits.
Graywolf’s SEO Blog – Graywolf always has an interesting tae on the SEO world.
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog – Solid SEO advice.
SEO BlackHat: Black Hat SEO BlogShedding light on the darker side of SEO.

Search

John Battelle’s Searchblog – Author of “The Search” has excellent insights into the world of search.
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO – This Google employee always has good advice for publishers who are looking to keep clear of being labeled a spammer by Google.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/ – Danny Sullivan’s SEW is an authoritative site,
Search Engines News – Great source for search engine marketing news

General Publishing

Shoemoney – Skills to pay the bills – Jeremy is a very successful publisher and has some great insights and speaks his mind.
Copyblogger – Great tips on who to write to attract traffic and sell.
AdMoolah News and Views – Of course I have to add my own blog!

Blogging

ProBlogger Blog Tips – The resource for anyone who has a blog.
Sifry’s Alerts – David Sifry runs Technorati and has a good grasp one what’s going on in the blogging world.

Planet Ozh announced a new WordPress theme called Problogger Clean that has some built in AdSense functionality.

This theme is particularly aimed towards bloggers who want to spend more time blogging, and less time installing. From within an admin option panel, you specify your Adsense id and channels. No need to manualy edit files before uploading the theme : install it, modify options in a neat interface, and use it.

Another feature I dig is called “Adsense Safety Click” : when you are viewing your own blog, the Adsense code is modified so that a test account is used instead of your own Adsense id. Benefit ? Any click you would accidentaly make on your own ads will not be counted, and therefore will not be considered as fraudulent (this feature needs your login cookie as “admin” to be active)

However, this is a blatant violation of the AdSense Terms of Service, which states:

Code Modification

Any AdSense ad code, search box code, or referral code must be pasted directly into Web pages without modification. AdSense participants are not allowed to alter any portion of the ad code or change the layout, behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads for any reason

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Use at your own risk!

YPN has added a feature to allow publishers to put ads in RSS feeds. This feature looks similar to the AdSense RSS ads and is open to all publishers in the YPN beta.

They have a brief description of the new offering:

Ads in RSS allows you to place ad listings within your RSS Feeds. The ad listings may be relevant to the content of your RSS Feed in general or to a particular post.

Ads in RSS enables you to:

* Provide targeted ads that are related to the content of your RSS Feeds.
* Generate additional revenue from your RSS Feed.
* Track the performance of multiple RSS Feeds or Posts.

This last point is particularly interesting. Not being able to get good statistics on how many people are reading feeds is a common complaint from publishers. It will be interesting to see how well this works.

There is now a new tab in the “Ad Setup” section of the YPN site.

This page walks you through the process of, 1. Registering a New RSS Feed or 2. Selecting an Existing RSS Feed; 3. Previewing Your RSS Ad Unit; 4. Copying Your RSS Ad Code; and 5. Updating Your RSS Feed Template.

A few things to note.

• RSS ads are currently only available for WordPress or Movable Type users.
• For WordPress, the ads can only be inserted into full text feeds only, not summary feeds.
• Ads can be generated for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds

Here is a sample of the ads:

I might try this out on a few blogs I have. I will probably not put the ads on the AdMoolah blog for now.

I came across a splog (spam blog) today that had what seemed like a dangerous element to it. This splog was simply copying entries from other RSS feeds and posting them to their own blog. (Of course, no credit was given to the original author.) However, I noticed one of the original entries had an AdSense for RSS ad on it, and this was also copied into the splog. I checked and the publisher ID in the splog matched the publisher ID on the original site. This means the ad is showing up on a site that the original publisher has no control over.

This seem particularly nasty because if the splog is violating AdSense Policy, the original publisher may be penalized for it. I’m sure Google is smart enough to know what is going on, but it certainly is something to watch out for.

You can get more information about fighting splog.

This will be of interest to those of you who run AdSense on a WordPress blog (like I do).
Plant OZH has a post about creating a new WordPress Theme that includes “Adsense optimization”. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but it sounds interesting. Currently setting up AdSense on a WordPress blog usually takes a little bit of tweaking PHP code, so this might be a good option for people who aren’t comfortable with PHP.

I’d love to hear more details about the AdSense piece of this theme.