AdMoolah News and Views

I finally got around to doing some much needed maintenance on this blog.

First switched hosts. (I highly recommend DreamHost, use this link and promo code ADMOOLAH50 to save $50. Yes that’s an affiliate link.) I used to have this site on an individual hosting plan that was costing me about $30 a year, which was way too much. The old host was also less reliable (lots of downtime) and slower.

I also upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and so far I like the changes. I know I should always keep up with the latest version of WordPress, but it usually takes me a while to get around to it. It really is pretty easy upgrading and only takes a few minutes, so I should do it more often.

I have also been neglecting this blog as far as posting goes, but I hope to change that as well. I’ve had a little change in job situations which should give me more time to blog here, and more importantly will give me more time to devote to the sites that actually make money for me.

Recently, AdSense changed. JenSense has a post detailing all the changes.

One of the major changes is that publishers now must include a privacy policy. The new Terms and Conditions states:

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

I have a feeling that the vast majority of publishers do not have anything like this currently on their sites. I know I don’t. Here is what I am currently considering planning to put on my site. Feel free to use it on your own site. If you have any comments about it please let me know! I’ll try and update this post if I feel any changes are needed.

We have relationships with other companies that we allow to place ads on our Web pages. As a result of your visit to our site, ad server companies may collect information such as your domain type, your IP address and clickstream information and may be placing and reading cookies on your browser. If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your browser options.

While I mostly talk about AdSense on this blog, I have actually started to earn a lot more money from affiliate programs then I do from AdSense. I haven’t talked about it much because I don’t consider myself very knowledgeable when it comes to affiliate programs. In order to learn more about affiliate marketing I’m going to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas next week.

I’m going to try to go into the conference with a very open mind. I want to try to expose myself to as many possible ideas as I can to see what I can do to expand my online business. I’m looking at it as an idea-generating opportunity.

I have seen a lot of talk lately about Pay Per Play ads. PPP are ads that plays a 5 second audio ad automatically to every visitor who visits you site. I guess the company is offering a pretty aggressive referral program, because everybody seems to be pushing them lately.

I personally would not sign up for the network. I find the ads very annoying and would never subject my visitors to this annoyance. But I guess if you had a site where you didn’t care about return visitors, they might be OK.

I didn’t get as many responses as I hoped for, but here is the data from my AdSense 2007 Christmas Gift Survey. It seems like you need to be making 6 figures to be considered for the gift. This amount is much higher than I expected. Here is the data:

People who responded “No, I didn’t receive a gift” reported earning of:

1. 5,000
2. 5,000
3. 6,000
4. 11,000
5. 12,000
6. 20,000
7. 20,000
8. 23,500
9. 25,000
10. 30,000
11. 30,000
12. 45,000
13. 50,000
14. 50,000
15. 80,000
16. 85,000
17. 175,000

People who did receive a gift reported the following earnings:

1. 168,000
2. 1,500,000

I have started a survey using PollDaddy to see if I can figure out what earnings are need to receive a gift in 2007.

If you were an AdSense publisher and made at least $5,000 dollars this year, please fill out this survey. It simply asks if you received a gift, and what your estimated 2007 AdSense earnings are. Of course, all answers are anonymous. I made quite a bit more than $5,000 and didn’t receive a gift, so I’m wondering where the limit is. (The survey only allows 100 respondents, so I want to make sure that the answers aren’t all low-earning publishers saying “no”).

Take the poll

It’s getting to be the time of year when Google sends out a gift to many of their top publishers. Nobody knows for sure what amount you need to earn before you deserve a gift, but you do need to be making at least 4 figures a year.

Here is a list of the previous years presents.

2004 – AM/FM Radio with Mood Light

Turn down the lights. Turn on the mood music. Now, let the light show gently take you on a journey into 7 vibrant hues and passages of soothing relaxation. This AM/FM Radio with precision quality sound, LED technology, and rotating gravity switch helps you choose just the right mood. It even has a 60 minute timer. (from Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger)

2005 – USB Accessories

A wireless mini mouse, with scroll wheel, usb charger for mouse with retractable cord, usb 4 port hub, usb gooseneck led light, 128mb usb flash drive with wrist strap, headset with retractable cord.

Picture and description from ProBlogger again.

2006 – A Digital Photo Frame

A 960×240 screen and supports JPG images, MP3, WMA or WAV audio files and AVI movies. It also has a SD card reader for extra memory. Comes with a mini USB cable, power cord, batteries, and an international power adapter.

Picture and description from Sean Hogan’s Blog.

2007 – What’s Your Guess?

So what will the gift be this year? I hope to find out first hand!

I hadn’t seen this mentioned anywhere before (maybe I just missed it), but it looks like you can now select specific videos when setting up AdSense Video. I know this is something a lot of publishers have been asking for.

It seems like you can’t pick any video at all from YouTube, it has to be in the list of providers that they supply. This is a fairly limited list, but at least it’s a start.

There is a help page in AdSense entitled “How do I choose individual videos to play in my video units?” that gives complete instructions on how to do it. It is a little clunky right now, you have to search for the name of the provider you are interested in, find a video you are interested in and then add the name of the video to the “hints” section of the Video Ad Unit setup.

I haven’t tried this out myself yet, let me know if you have success with it.

YPN has announced a partnership with Adobe that will allow publishers to put ads in PDF files.

Publishers will be able to upload PDFs to Yahoo, and the ads will be inserted. Publishers can than email the PDFs or put them on websites. The ads will be contextual and will be displayed to the right of the content.

This is an interesting new way to display. E-Book authors have often released free e-books with affiliate links in the as a way to make money, but this allows one more monetization option. One problem I see with the ads is they are not integrated into the content area of the PDFs, so I think the Click-through-rates will be terrible.

If you are interested, you can apply for the beta. It doesn’t look like you have to have a current YPN account to apply, but like the YPN beta, only US publishers will be accepted.

According to TechCrunch, the super-hot social networking site, Facebook is getting ready to launch an AdSense competitor on Novemeber 6th. The new ad network will be called SocialAds.

What will set it apart from AdSense is that it will serve ads that are targeted according to a Facebook user profile, instead of contextually like AdSense ads are. There is no word yet on what ads they will serve to people who don’t have a Facebook user profile. An interesting option would be to allow publishers to display other ads in that case.

This could be a great new competitor for AdSense from a potentially huge company. Facebook has been valued at $15 billion and recently took about $750 in funding from Microsoft and others.