AdMoolah News and Views

It looks like Google has quietly added an official “AdSense Help” Google Group.

According to the welcome message dated March 7th,:

Welcome to the AdSense Help group! We hope this forum will become an
important part of the AdSense community, and provide another outlet for
you to search for answers, ask questions about AdSense, find tips to
optimize your account, and make good use of your own AdSense expertise
to assist others.

Google will have an official representative on the group named AdSensePro.

This seems like direct competition for the very active Digital Point’s AdSense forum and WebmasterWorld’s AdSense forum. There is no word on whether or no AdSenseAdvisor will continue to post to these forums, or if Google will make the new Google group the only forum with an official AdSense representative.

There are currently only 28 members of the group and about 18 message, it will be interesting to see how quickly it grows.

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.

I just found out AdMoolah’s blog is up for a award at KBCafe’s Blog Awards in the Best Webvertising Blog category. All the other blogs in that category are on my must read list, so I’m flattered just to be included in that list.

I have not been able to blog for the past two weeks for a variety of reason: a crashed hard drive, a vacation and some business travel. This post will highlight some of the interesting things that happened in the AdSense world and beyond.

Some animated backgrounds were spotted on AdSense ads. These ads had some animated arrows on them. See JenSense and ProBlogger for more coverage.

The AdSense Firefox referral program is now available to international publishers. See JenSense and ProBlogger for more coverage.

Google is testing Click-To-Call ads. Ads are appearing in search results that have a small phone icon beside them. When you click it you can enter your phone number and be directly connected to the advertiser. The feature is not available to publishers yet, but it will be interesting to see the payouts for this when they do. See ProBlogger for more coverage.

Chitika made some publishers very unhappy by slashing revenue in audited reports. Chitika seemed to be on their way to becoming a major player in the small publisher advertising space, but this knocked a lot of wind out of their sails. People were very upset that the revenue they will actually receive is much less than they thought it was going to be. See JenSense, Eric Giguere and ProBlogger for more coverage.

New background colors for Firefox referral buttons were released. Some of the buttons are now available with blue and orange backgrounds. See JenSense for more coverage.

Its the beginning of the month again, so let’s see some earning for September. Just go to the AdMoolah Input Page to submit your monthly totals

I hope it was a record month for you!

I have added a new Query by PageRank feature. You can get to it from the query page.

It displays all the records in the database grouped by PageRank.

After reading YPN’s Terms and Conditions, It seemed like they did not allow publishers to reveal their monthly revenue amount. To be sure I emailed support and they responded by letting me know that revenue amount cannot be shared at this point.

So, for now, AdMoolah will be for sharing AdSense revenue only. Hopefully when YPN goes out of beta they will amend the Terms and Conditions to allow revenue to be made public, and I can ad YPN revenue sharing to the database.

It’s time to submit your AdSense earnings for August. I hope it was a good month for you.

There is a program called AlternateURL that puts replacement ads on you site when Google would put a PSA on your site. I joined this program and tried it out on several sites. They also have a referral program which allows you to get 10% of your referrers earnings.

I am now removing the AlternateURL ads from my site and taking the referral ads off of my site. The CTR and CPC rates for this program were horrible. In case you want to try it for yourself my affiliate link is: AlternateURL.

I apologize to anyone who signed up for this program based on my ad and was disappointed with the results.

Here is the note I sent to AlternateURL today:

Update: I received a response from AlternateURL which I have copied at the bottom of this post.

---

Your program sounds like a great idea but I am getting terrible results. My referral network is seeing about a 0.0025% CTR with less less than $0.02 CPC.

I would suggest 2 enhancements:
1) Allow custom color palettes for the ads. Right now the ads look ugly because they don’t blend in with sites. Having ugly ads also reduces CTR.
2) Better targeting of ads. You should allow at least a general category of ads to display. Your off-target ads are not doing well.

I’ll be removing AlternateURL from my site until I hear that you’ve made these improvements, then I’ll consider putting them back on.

---

Response From AlternateURL
The rates are improving. We share 1/2 of revenue with our members, and the
average CPC is now at 9.5 cents. We are confident this will continue to
rise.

You are right. CTR can be improved with color customization. We are working
on this now.

The categorization is another area that can be improved. Additional
back-end sponsors will ensure that the relevancy improves over time.

I appreciate you taking the time and for your honest evaluation. I hope you
will come back when the next ad code customization has been completed.

I have seen some differing opinions about ads in RSS feeds lately.

In an interview on JenSense, Jason Calacanis said this:

How successful have the AdSense for Feeds ads in your RSS been? Have you had a problem with readers not wanting ads in their feeds from you?

Like three folks were upset about RSS ads. Now, we have millions of people coming to our sites every month so we’re not going to stop the revenue for three freaks who want free content without advertising (don’t we all want that?!?!).

If you did a survey and asked people watching Desperate Housewives if they would consider paying to have it without commercials people would say yes. You could ask the same group if they would like to save money by watching the Sopranos for free with ads in it and they would say they would consider it!

Ads in RSS are no big deal. They are just like banners or text links on a web page. If you produce great content people will deal with the ads, and if you produce really great content a certain percentage of those folks will pay for the content (if you want to go that route). So, it’s important that when you’re running a business you ignore the freaks and listen to the real fans. Real fans of the site understand you need to make money in order to produce free content, and those real fans even visit the advertisers and buy their products knowing that it will support the product they love.

Dave Winer, on the other hand, expressed the totally opposite viewpoint:

Taegan Goddard asked me to say when I re-subb’d to the Political Wire feed after he removed the ads, so it only seems fair to say that I unsubbed today, and that’s the last time you’ll hear about it here. He brought the ads back, without notice, without permission of the readers. It’s pulling my attention into his stuff, and dammit that’s my aggregator not his, and not FeedBurner’s and not his advertiser’s (who I won’t name here). I think advertising is so over, and it really pains me to see a visionary like Goddard go this way.

So that leads me to the question: Should I put AdSense for RSS ads in my AdMoolah RSS feeds?

I think I’m with Jason on this one. The feeds are supplying some free information, so the readers should be willing to put up with a little advertising.