AdMoolah News and Views

There is a thread at Digital Point in which someone posted about what is apparantly a new feature in AdSense beta testing. The thread includes a screen shot of a tab called “My Client Center”. This seems like it may similar to the AdWords client center, which allows a third party agencies to handle multiple accounts from a single sign in.

JenSense has some more commentary.

Lately people have seemed to notice that the number of ads that are displayed in a single ad unit can vary. There have been threads on Digital Point Forums (and a second thread too) and Webmaster World about this. Many people are upset about units with fewer than normal ads in them because they feel the design of the site is compromised.

This is a feature that Google has had for at least four months, so I’m suspecting that all the complaints are because Google has been using them more often then they did in the past. Here is the initial description of this feature from the Inside AdSense blog.

We’ve updated AdSense to now vary the number of text ads that appear in a given ad unit. When we have a set of highly relevant and useful ads, we give them more of a presence in the ad unit by eliminating other ads. In some cases, if we determine a particular ad performs extremely well on a page, we’ll remove all other ads from the unit and show just this single ad

I have no reason to doubt Google when they say this feature, on the average, means more revenue for publishers. Remember, more money for publishers means more money for Google.

Whether or not the ads look ugly or not probably depends on the layout of a particular site. Sites that make the ads blend in using techniques like images beside the ads probably suffer the most. These ads usually look fine on sites where the ads are separated from content.

A month after Chitika angered publishers by drastically reducing payments after showing audited figures, they are having problems again. This time they have announced that their auditing for the month of November will be late by about two weeks. This also means that November payment will be about two weeks later than outline by their terms and conditions, which states a net-30 payment.

They also decided to announce this problem via their blog, instead of emailing publishers directly.

I’m sure many more publishers will be dropping Chitika because of these problems; if Chitika keeps this up they may not have any publishers left.

See more reaction at JenSense and Inside Online Advertising.

A new Trojan Horse that has hit the internet replaces AdSense ads with fake ones. Techshout.com is reporting on the problem. The ads look like real AdSense ads, right down to the “Ads by Google”.

The AdSense team validated the news saying, “We can confirm from the screenshots that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.”

The real victims of this Trojan Horse are the AdSense publishers, since they are the ones loosing money.

Found via JenSense.

Google has announced that a recording of yesterday’s Webinar is now available online.

Unfortunately it is only playable with Internet Explorer, not Firefox. Google should put some pressure on WebEx to fix that

Google has announced that the new themed holiday ads are appearing from now until December 26th.

I have seen them on one of my sites, and unfortunately they look pretty ugly because they use the default color scheme instead of the custom colors I had set up. Oh well, we’ll see how they perform.

AdSense had their webinar, which was focused on new features, this morning. Unlike previous webinars, participants were allowed to type in questions, instead of them taking questions via phone. This allowed them to field many more questions then they were previously.

They will be posting the presentation and a transcript including the question and answer session within 24 hours, so I will simply highlight some of thing that I found interesting.

They mentioned many new features and improvements they had been considering, including:

• More button formats for the referral program
• Individual sites has may have different OSASU landing pages
• Allowing “Advertise on this site” to appear on only certain ads
• Allowing text links for referrals
• Allowing publishers to choose fonts for ads
• Showing image ads in the preview tools

Other things mentioned that I found interesting included:

• Referral buttons do not affect smart pricing
• Referral buttons can be placed on non-content pages such as thank you and login pages.
• Publishers can put any contact information they want in the On-Site Advertiser Sign-Up site description. They can also mention other non-AdSense advertising opportunities. HTTP is not allowed on the page, but URLs can be included that can be cut-and-paste. This could be used to point to a site’s media kit.
• Publishers can direct potential advertisers to the On-Site Advertiser Sign-Up landing page via direct links or links in emails
• Referral buttons cannot be highlighted in any way. This would be considered enticing users to click.

I’ll post again once the official presentation and transcript is available from Google.

Eric Giguere has announced Best AdSense Resources of 2005 Poll. Go and vote for your favorite book, blog, case study, forum, personality, tool and website.

Digital Inspiration has release a new tool to preview ads for AdSense, YPN and Chitika. This is similar to Google’s AdSense preview tool that they have for Internet Explorer, but has some big advantages:

• Ads from AdSense, YPN and Chitika can all be previewed, including side-by-side comparisons of AdSense vs. YPN and AdSense vs. Chitika. This is very useful for seeing how the relevancy of ads compare across all three networks.
• The tool can show link unit ads and image ads
• They have a Firefox extension that will let you preview AdSense ads. I could never figure out why Google hasn’t done this themselves since they seem to be such big supporters of Firefox.

Read the Yahoo YPN, Chitika, AdSense Preview Tool announcement.

Found via Eric Giguere’s AdSense Blog

Not to be outdone by Google, Yahoo has sent some YPN publishers a gift as well. The gift is a stadium/picnic blanket and a greeting card that Yodels when opened. A good description of it can be found The Marketing Tools Review Blog.

As with the Google gift, there is no word on how much a publisher needs to earn before getting this gift.

Found via ProBlogger