AdMoolah News and Views

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.

It seems that Yahoo Publisher Network is having some major problems. The following message was presented to YPN publishers today:

You may have noticed a decrease in impressions in your Yahoo! Publisher Network account recently. This is due to a partial outage that occurred during routine maintenance. We are actively addressing the issue and expect improvements by next week. Thanks for your patience.

I know YPN is in Beta, but it’s going to take until next week? That’s a major issue. YPN seems to be loosing publisher anyway because they are not paying out as well as AdSense. These problems are only going to make things worse.

I have been running some YPN ads this week, but I have been changing things around quite a bit, so I’m not sure how many impressions I have been loosing.

Considering they are almost two years into the beta, things are not looking good for YPN. I would have thought they were passed problems like this by now.

Earlier this year, a South Korean Watchdog agency decided that Google’s program policies were unfair, and ordered them to have a new, more publisher-friendly version of their program policies. Today I noticed that they had a different version of their program policies for South Korea. Here is a link to the regular version of the program policies.

Unfortunately, the South Korean version of the program policies are in Korean (of course), so it is very hard to figure out what the differences are. Interestingly I tried to use Google translation on the page and got a message saying “Sorry, this URL is invalid”. Using Babelfish worked though. Trying to read the translated version makes for some fun reading though, for example:

Participation of the site against the program whole or a part the middle finger or it will be able to end and (the participation with a main contract or the program only, program, end of the Google or notice of the middle finger to you the middle finger or is regarded that it is ended in after where after 10 business day which is received elapses).

Notice of the middle finger? Sounds like some interesting policies there.

It seems like the main differences are in section 6 “Termination; Cancellation”. There is a lot more verbiage in the South Korean version than there is in the standard version.

I’m sure someone who know Korean will eventually let us know what the differences are. I’ll update this post with a link when that happens.

I finally got around to updating my AdSense Revenue Sharing list. It’s been about 9 months since I updated it, so there were quite a few changes. Many sites were added and removed.

As usual, if you find any problems, or you know of any additional revenue sharing sites, let me know. You can leave a comment in this post or email me. I’ll try not to wait 9 months to do my next update.

A new website ReviewBack launched today. It provides a service where people can review each others blog. The sign up is free and there are no fees involved in getting or giving reviews.

This service is sort of like ReviewMe or PayPerPost, except that instead of paying cash for a review, you pay by providing your own review back to the site that reviewed you. So far, I don’t see any signs of how they are going to monetize this service, but I assume that it will be advertising based revenue.

This seems like a great way for smaller blogs to get some link love and attention from other bloggers. I have signed up, along with about 60 other blogs. Right now there hasn’t been any “review action”, so I’m not even sure how the whole process works. If you want to find out how this thing work, sign up and request a review from me! I have to warn you that I will be very very picky about who I accept a review exchange from.

I’ve always been interested in using Feedburner for my RSS subscriptions, but I always thought it would be a pain to switch all my existing subscribers to the new feed. Then, a week or so ago I saw a post by Shoemoney, saying that he had switched to Feedburner. I realized that I didn’t was still subscribed to his old feed, but was getting new updates. I did some investigation and found that Feedburner has a cool WordPress plugin that redirects the existing feed URLs to a new Feedburner link.

So I am now using Feedburner for this blog, and I think I’ll start switching some of my other blogs over too. I like the tracking that they give you, and there are a lot of features I think I’ll experiment with too. I never knew how many subscribers I had to this blog. Now, as can be seen from the widget below, I know I have a little over 200 subscribers.

Google has started beta testing what have been dubbed “Gadget Ads”. These are AdSense ads that go beyond text or image ads. Gadget ads are widgets that advertisers can create. Widgets are like mini-applications that can run on a publishers site. The idea is that the ads will be much more interesting and engaging that standard ads.

To get an idea what gadgets ads will look like, you can take a look at Google’s Gadget page. Now imagine what an advertiser could do with this type of interactivity. There could be some interesting and creative ads built with this technology.

These ads will come in standard AdSense sizes, and will be available on a CPM or CPC basis. Like usual, there is no word on when these would become available to all publishers.

Even though Google is the clear leader in online advertising, it is great to see them always innovating and trying new things. More options for publishers means more revenue possibilities for publishers.

Found on Niall Kennedy’s blog.

After reading a post on CommunitySpark, I have decided to remove the nofollow attributes from the comments on this blog. I don’t get very many comments on this blog, and I’m hoping this will encourage people to comment a little more.

I am using the Nofollow Case by Case plugin to do this. I have spam under control with the Spam Karma plugin, so allowing non-nofollwed links should not be a problem.

Comment away!