AdMoolah News and Views

John Chow has a great post on the monetization of his blog. He has gone from making $352.94 in September to making $3,440.66 in January. Almost a 10 fold increase in 4 months! He did this mostly by bring new revenue streams to his blog. His top 5 earners were: Direct Ad Sales ($750.00), Text Links Ads ($621.68), Affiliate Sales ($545.00), Google AdSense ($536.58) and Vibrant IntelliTXT ($478.18).

He has done this with 133,871 unique visitors bringing 255,574 page views. That works out to a $13.46 CPM.

This sure makes me want to keep trying new revenue streams, particularly Text Link Ads (aff link).

Good news from AdSense, the referral amounts for publisher referrals has been changed for the better. There is now a two-tier system in place. If a publisher that you referred reaches $5.00 within 180 days, you will receive $5.00. If a publisher you referred reached $100 dollars you get $250. This is a nice jump from the previous $100.

This seems to be effective retroactively to some degree. I see a $5.00 referral already in my account, although I’m not sure how far back they have applied these new amounts.

As usual, JenSense had the scoop on the official word, although I saw Darren mention it first.

Update: AdSense has posted about this on the Inside AdSense blog and there are some additions to the publisher referral program:

If, in any 180-day period, you refer 25 publishers who each earn more than $100 within 180 days of their respective sign-ups and are all eligible for payout, you will be awarded a $2,000 bonus (bonus payouts are limited to 1 per year).

They also have changed the AdWords advertiser program:

• When an advertiser you refer spends $5 within 90 days of sign-up (in addition to the $5 sign-up fee) you will be credited with $5.
• When that same advertiser spends $100 within 90 days of sign-up, you will be credited with an additional $40.
• If, in any 180 day period, you refer 20 advertisers who each spend more than $100 within 90 days of their respective sign-ups, you will be awarded a $600 bonus (bonus payments are limited to 1 per year).

They also included details on how past referrals are effected:

These rules will also apply to users that you have already referred but who have not yet reached one of the new earning/spend thresholds. For example, if you referred an AdSense publisher who has currently earned $2.00, you will be paid $5.00 if that publisher reaches the $5.00 mark. But, if you have referred an AdSense publisher who has already earned $10.00, you will not be paid $5.00 retroactively for that referral reaching the $5.00 mark. However, should that publisher eventually reach the $100.00 earnings mark within 180 days, you will be paid $250.00.

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

There have been some premature reports about the death of the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool. Apparently Yahoo has not killed this tool, it is just running very slowly due to it being overloaded.

YahooSarah has this to say in a DigitalPoint thread:

I wanted to confirm that YSM’s public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.

We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year.

Many webmasters who relied on this tool as a free way of finding keyword suggestions, and they won’t be happy about this. Luckily Wordtracker quickly stepped up and have provided a free keyword suggestion tool of their own to use. With this tool, you enter keywords, and it comes back with the top 100 suggested keywords and the estimated daily search volume for those keywords.

Performancing Partners ad network is closing at the end of the month. At the end of last month they announced that the ad network was to be sold to PayPerPost, but then the deal was canceled.

They have also recently announced that they are no longer running their metrics program. This leaves them with their Performancing for Firefox Blogging tool.

(I hope you don’t mind me plugging my new site again, but I am sure this announcement will appeal to a lot of you.)

I have enabled a new feature on SEOyak.com. Whenever you submit a story, you can create a text ad that will be displayed permanently on the story page. SEOyak.com participants know the value of a text link, so it should be a great incentive for users to start to submit stories. Here are details of the ad program.

So sign up now, or if you are already signed up, go submit a story.

JenSense, again has the scoop on the new AdSense policy changes: It’s official! You can now run AdSense on the same page as other contextual ad programs

So it seems that Google tightened things a little by not allowing similar looking ads to appear on a site, but at the same time loosened things by allowing other contextual ads on the same page. Note however, the YPN’s terms do not allow YPN to be on the same page as other contextual ads, so you still can’t run AdSense and YPN on the same page.

Thanks to Jennifer for staying on top of this for us. Know we just need to figure out how different ads need to be in order to be considered different looking.

Google has updated their AdSense program policies. There are many small changes, but there is also one major change: If publishers use ad networks other than AdSense anywhere on their sites, they must now make sure the ads look different. JenSense has the details of all the changes and a special post on the competitive ad policy.

This is going to effect many publishers, myself included. It is currently standard practice to run A/B tests with Google and other ad networks. You randomly rotate Google ads with ads from another network using the same formats and color schemes, and see which one performs the best. This will no longer be possible. It is also common to display ads from other non-contextual ad networks in formats that are very similar to AdSense. Again this will no longer be possible.

This is going to cause a lot of confusion and questions for publishers. There has been a lot of debate on the forums about how acceptable it is to display an image close to an ad. I think trying to figure out what is acceptable for competitive ads is going to be even more difficult. The new policy states:

In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

But what is considered the same color, if you have AdSense in dark green and Chitika ads in light green, is that different enough? If you always use leaderboards for AdSense and skyscrapers for Yahoo, is that different enough? Is adding a border enough?

There is going to be a lot of talk about this on the forums and in blogs. People are not going to like this.

Well, I’m going to be busy the next few days trying to figure this out and implement the changes on my website. AdSense has never performed very well for me on AdMoolah, so I think I’m going to switch to Miva MC to give it a try.

Today MIVA launched a new self service advertising platform for publishers call MIVA Monetization Center (or MIVA MC).

MIVA MC includes three different advertising options for publishers.

1. Content Ads. These are similar to the AdSense and YPN that we all know. One unique thing about them is you can choose to have them contextually driven, or keyword driven. This is a feature that a lot of publishers wish Google had, so it could be attractive for a lot of people.
2. Inline Ads. These ads are underlines words in the content of the website. When a visitor hovers over the underlined test, an ad is displayed. I personally find these ads very annoying and wouldn’t use them on my own sites.
3. Search Ads. These can be used to display ads in search pages on the publishers own site. This seems very similar to AdSense for Search.

One bonus for small publishers is that the payout is only a $25 minimum and can be done via PayPal.

Another point in their favor is that there is no exclusivity clause. They don’t mind you having ads from another network on the same page. Since their Content Ads have a keyword option, they should be allowed on the same page as AdSense as well.

Another great thing is that they will be letting the publisher know what the revenue split is.

Unfortunately for international publisher, keyword driven ads, search ads and revenue spit transparency are available only to U.S. publisher right now.

I have filled out an application and will experiment with them if I get accepted.

Update: I have been accepted into the program. It took less than 4 hours!

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