AdMoolah News and Views

Students in an Iowa State University statistics class recently used data from AdMoolah in a group project. Hadley Wickham, who teaches Statistics 480, had the students collect data and then attempt to answer questions based on the data. Two of these papers have been published on the page outline the requirements for the project.

Some of the students had some interesting questions and conclusions.

One paper attempted to answer the question: “Is there a difference in earnings between categories, sub-categories, language and page view/page rank?” The conclusion reached was:

The analysis of the Google AdSense data resulted in more questions than answers. The main dependent variable used in the majority of the sectional analysis was average earnings. Earnings were found to be dependent upon seasonal effects (through quarter of year)and upon assigned PageRank score of the website. Increased earnings could also be captured if a website was published in either English or Danish languages.

Read the full paper here.

A second paper also had some interesting analysis. My favorite part of this one was an analysis of how more page views per visitor effects results. They found “a negative relationship between the number of times the page is viewed and the amount of earnings”. That is, having more page views makes your average eCPM go down.

Read the full paper here.

I think this project was a great idea. These are the kinds of questions I had in mind when I started AdMoolah, and these student did a good job of providing some rigorous analysis of the data. I’d like to thank Hadley Wickham and all his students for the work they put into this.

A few months ago, many high profile bloggers in the SEO community started using the MyBlogLog Widget on their pages. This included people such as ShoeMoney, Andy Beal, and GrayWolf. People were excited about building their communities and the opportunity to network with other blogger. I also joined up in December and placed the widget on my blog.

Soon, however reports of MyBlogLog spamming started rolling in. People were adding links to their networks via automated scripts, people came up with automated ways of getting their pictures at the top of high profiles blogs. People discovered how to automatically add others as co-authors on their blogs.

One of the highest profile bloggers talking about these issues was ShoeMoney. He was pointing out flaws and also pointed out a way people could surf the web pretending to be any member of MyBlogLog they wanted. This action got him banned from MyBlogLog. This caused many other bloggers, including Andy Beal and GrayWolf to boycott MyBlogLog.

The ban was a surprising move by the MyBlogLog, they are a focused on helping bloggers so you’d think they would “get it”. They should have embraced what ShoeMoney was doing and thanked him for pointing out the flaws. Instead, banning a high profile, popular member from their service caused a lot of backlash. Bloggers are a tight-knit bunch, and they should have known doing something like that was going to get them in hot water. MyBlogLog did finally do the right thing and unbanned ShoeMoney, but I think the damage is already done.

To add to their public relation problems, bloggers such as JenSense, have been reporting that MyBlogLog is keeping track of click data on AdSense and YPN click-throughs. Most webmasters consider this data very private and do not like the idea of giving it away for free. Again, this news is spreading through the blogger community, and the reaction is negative. I guess MyBlogLog could help things by allowing users to opt out of this option, but again, I think the damage is already done.

MyBlogLog has definitely slipped, and I’m not sure that they can fully recover. This is a good opportunity for competing service, like Explode, to gain some ground. I personally have taken MyBlogLog off my site, and am thinking of trying out some alternatives.

Yahoo Publisher Network has updated their policies to allow only 3 ad units per page. I’m not really surprised by this, AdSense has had this same policy in place since I can remember. I’m sure this has to do with their recent change to eliminate duplicate ads in multiple ad units on the same page. If a publisher had 15 ads on their page, it would be difficult to fill all those spots with relevant ads.

Yahoo Publishing Network announced today that they have started to display unique ads across multiple ad units on a single page. Previously, if there were multiple ads units on a single page the same ads would be duplicated in each ad unit. Now the ads will be unique.

It surprises me that it took Yahoo this long to make the change. It’s something AdSense has done for as long as I can remember, and something a lot of publishers noticed right away as a deficiency in the system

A hacker has been targeting many SEO sites and has already successfully taken over many of them, including WolfHowl and Stuntdubl. I first noticed this on WolfHowl’s blog and I though it might be some sort of sneaky linkbait, but it seems to be legitimate. Here is the Hacker’s blog with his plan: http://fuckingpirate.wordpress.com/ (I won’t give him a link).

One of the tricks he was using was a WordPress security problem, which has since been fixed in version 2.0.7. If you use WordPress, I would recommend updating now. (Which I am about to do, hopefully this blog will survive the upgrade.)

There is a DigitalPoint thread on this topic.

Update: WordPress.com has now taken the hackers blog offline. Also, I successfully updated to WordPress 2.0.7

Now is you chance to win a link on the home page of AdMoolah.com.

I am pleased to announce a contest on SEOYak.com that will let one lucky member get a free link for a month. The more you participate at SEOYak.com, the better you chances of winning, so register at SEOYak.com today and start voting, commenting and submitting new stories!

In case you missed my earlier post, SEOYak.com is a social news site focused on the SEO community. It is much like Digg.com, except the stories are primarily about the world of SEO.

After a year and a half of writing this blog, I have finally managed to put an about me page up. Better late than never I guess.

I originally posted my AdSense Revenue Sharing List back in February. Since then I have added at least a few more sites to the list every month. It has now grown to 50 sites. As usual, if you know of other, feel free to email me at tlainevool [at] admoolah.com

JenSense has the scoop on a new feature on AdSense for Search that allows you to open the search results on your own page instead of a page at Google.

This will be great for publishers who weren’t using AdSense for search because they didn’t want to send traffic off their own sites.

Google has a help page with the implementation details.

The equation for calculating how much revenue is generated with a CPC program is:

pageviews * CTR (click-through-rate) * RPC (revenue per click)

So far, this blog has focused on CPC and RPC. Lately I have become more interested in the pageviews part of this equation – basically increasing traffic. This is were the real growth opportunity is. CTR and RPC will always be limited, but traffic is almost limitless. Even giants like Yahoo and Google worry about increasing page views.

So, from here on in you’ll start seeing posts about things like marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), link building and buying advertising. I hope you enjoy exploring these topics with me.

I will still be posting about the advertising related topics I always have, so if you like that part of the blog, please do stick around.