AdMoolah News and Views

Here is a mini-review of WidgetBucks, a new advertising network.

They seems very similar to Chitika, in that they offer interactive widgets that are focused on selling consumer focused good for sale. You can currently see and example of the widget installed at the top of this blog.

They do seem to have a few things going for them. First of all set up was very easy, although they had a fairly limited pallet of colors to choose from. When you set up an ad, you can run them contextually, like AdSense ads, or you can choose from a list of categories.

Another good part of this is their referral program. They offer a 10% referral cut for the first 12 months.

I doubt these ads are going to perform very well on this blog. Since the ads are very consumer product focused. I had the same problems with Chitika ads. However I’ll leave them on this blog for a while, I always like experimenting with new ad programs.

Depending on the type of person you are, this story will either make you depressed, or will motivate you. Ashley Qualls, who is 17 years old, runs a MySpace layout site targeted towards teen girls – and she earns $70,000 a month from AdSense.

Fast Company has an article about Ashley.

Some of the more interesting quotes.

At 17 going on 37 (at least), Ashley is very much an Internet professional. In the less than two years since Whateverlife took off, she has dropped out of high school, bought a house, helped launch artists such as Lily Allen, and rejected offers to buy her young company. Although Ashley was flattered to be offered $1.5 million and a car of her choice–as long as the price tag wasn’t more than $100,000–she responded, in effect, Whatever. “I don’t even have my license yet,” she says.

She has taken in more than $1 million, thanks to a now-familiar Web-friendly business model. Her MySpace page layouts are available for the bargain price of…nothing. They’re free for the taking. Her only significant source of revenue so far is advertising.

“My mom still doesn’t understand how I do it,” Ashley says. To be fair, she did go to her mother for the initial investment: $8 to register the domain name. Ashley still hasn’t spent a dime on advertising.

This is really amazing. It shows that if you find the right niche and know your audience well, just about anybody can do really well on the internet. There is no more need to have an MBA, find funding, or even have a business plan to have a very successful business.

I’m testing out a new widget called BlugRush from Income.com’s John Reese. You should be able to see the widget in the right sidebar.

The idea behind the widget is that it displays headlines from other BlogRush users on you website, and your blog’s headlines get displayed on other people widgets. So it is basically a way of gaining some extra traffic to you blog. For every visitor that sees the widget on your blog, you earn credits, and those credits are used to display the latest headline from your blog on other sites.

They also have a referral system in place where you can get a percentage of the credits for every person that signs up under you. The referral system goes down ten levels, so people who get into this early may get quite a few visitors from this. I guess it’s too early to tell how many visitors, I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

Google’s officially approved way of doing AdSense Revenue sharing is through the AdSense API. Websites that use the API can allow it’s visitors to sign up for AdSense and create a revenue sharing program. Up until now, anybody could sign up for the program and start using the API. Starting tomorrow, however, only sites that have more than 100,000 page views a month will be able to use the API.

This means that if you have wanted to try out for the API, but have been waiting, don’t wait any longer. If you sing up today you can still use the API even if your site does not get 100,00 page views per month. The following quote is from their information page about the new minimum pageview requirements:

I have not started developing and do not meet the traffic requirements, is there anything I can do?

Run, don’t walk, to the Developer Information Form to register. If you do this before September 13, 2007, you will still be able to submit your implementation for approval, regardless of your traffic. If you do not meet the traffic requirement, you must submit your implementation for review before December 15, 2007.

There was recently a thread at DigitalPoint forums that asked the question, “Is AdSense a monopoly?”. Almost half of the people who responded to a poll thought it was a monopoly. AdSense is not a monopoly, and here’s why.

Investopedia defines a monopoly as “A situation in which a single company or group owns all or nearly all of the market for a given type of product or service. By definition, monopoly is characterized by an absence of competition – which often results in high prices and inferior products.” Given this definition, AdSense is clearly not a monopoly.

AdSense Does Have Competition

AdSense does have a large share of the self-service ad market, but could you say it owns “all or nearly all of the market”? A survey of the Technorati Top 100 blogs shows that AdSense is the biggest player, but doesn’t even own half of that space. AdSense appeared on 24% of the top 100 blogs, 21% had no advertising, BlogAds and Doubleclick each appeared on 15%, with other ad networks appearing on 25% of blogs. So there is clearly significant competition.

AdSense Doesn’t Have Monopoly Power

So, I’m sure there are those that will argue that the above survey is too unscientific and doesn’t count. Lets move to important part of the second part of the definition: “high prices and inferior products”. Does Google have so much power in the market that it can get away with treating publishers like crap? Hardly. It has been calculated that Google give 78% of the revenue to publishers. This is a much better cut than many advertisers give. For example ReviewMe keeps 50% of the revenue and Affiliate Network typically keep 30%. So with Google keeping a smaller percentage of revenue than many of their smaller competitors, they cannot be accused of using their market leading position to slack off. When it comes to features and innovation it is also clear that they are continuing to push the envelope. Just this year they have introduced major improvements like Video Ads and Referrals 2.0. If Google had a true monopoly there would be no need to continue to innovate.

Why Isn’t AdSense a Monopoly?

So given that Google has great brand recognition and it seems like all anybody talks when it comes to Web site monetization about is AdSense, why doesn’t it have a monopoly? Unlike the in physical world, it is difficult to maintain a monopoly in online services. For example, take Bloglines. Bloglines used to have a lions share of the online feed reader market. It was basically the dominant reader – until Google Reader took off and now has a larger market share than Bloglines. Also, take the example of MySpace. There are no arguments that it has dominated the social networking space. However Facebook is making huge inroads here. If Facebook continues to innovate and attract users like it has been, it will soon be a very real challenger to MySpace.

In the physical world large players can make it difficult to compete by very legitimate means, like getting great ecomomies of scale, or sother tactics, like setting up exclusive contracts with suppliers. In the online world, these types of competitive advantages are simply not possible. In the physical world, being bigger means you can do things efficiently, such developing large distribution networks that smaller competitors can’t match, or making sure you have a larger and better space on the supermarket shelf compared to your competitor. In the online world bigger is not really better. Anybody can get cheap, reliable hosting and compete with just a bit of time and talent. Just look at Markus Frind who run plentyoffish.com on his own and competes in the lucrative online dating service with much bigger companies like Match.com.

That is the reason that AdSense will never be able to have a true monopoly, there are so many second tier players waiting in the wings, and it’s so easy to switch to another service, that if Google ever really tries something unfair, then they will quickly lose their dominant market position. So in that sense, nobody will ever have traditional monopoly power in the online ad space.

AuctionAds has announced that they are offering an instant $25.00 for new publishers that sign up. They also recently announced that their referral commission is increasing from 2% to 5%. With these two announcements, right now seems like a great time to sign up.

I blogged about a new AdSense Sites feature yesterday, but after i posted, they yenaked the new feature off of the control panel. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but now it seems like they were probably having problems with it, and decided to roll the new feature back. They will be pushing the new feature out as soon as they have things fixed again. Here is what AdSenseAdvisor (the official AdSense spokesperson on forums) had to say about it:

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the delayed update – I’ve been trying to find out as much as I could about this situation in order to make sure I passed along accurate information to all of you.

We’re very happy you’re all so excited about the new Allowed Sites feature. Unfortunately, we had to temporarily roll back its release, but expect to see it in your accounts again soon. We hope that it helps alleviate many of the concerns publishers have had about code theft and click sabotage.

In the meantime, our engineers have confirmed that we deactivated any settings you made yesterday, so your ads will continue to monetize as normal on all sites.

Again, we’re sorry for the inconvenience and confusion, and appreciate your patience.

-ASA

I’ll be sure to update things as more information becomes available.

Here is another update from AdSenseAdvisor

ann, if you (or anyone else) are seeing strange AdSense performance that seems to correlate with this Allowed Sites release and withdrawl, you’re welcome to PM me your pub ID or account login and a description of the behavior, and I’ll be more than happy to escalate it to our engineers for investigation.

We want to make sure this temporary release didn’t leave any weird loose ends…

-ASA

AdSense has introduced “Allowed Sites” a new feature that allows publishers to specify which sites they are running AdSense on. Users can leave things the way they always have been, that is, allowing any site to run ads with their publisher ID, or publishers can specify a list of sites that their AdSense ads will appear on. If any ads with the publisher’s ID appear on any site not in that list, the impressions and click will not be counted for that site.

The new feature can be accessed by going to the “AdSense Setup” tab on the control panel and selecting “Allowed Sites”.

This is something that many publishers have been asking for for quite a while. One addition I’d like to see to this is a report that would list all the sites that have displayed ads with your AdSense ID that are not on the list. This would be good for two reasons, It might show some sites that are up to no good, and it would reassure publisher that all their sites have been listed properly.

Update: The Allowed Sites feature seems to be gone from my AdSense control panel. And my Firefox AdSense Notifier that was broken all day seems to be working again. It looks to me like Google rolled back some changes.

Another Update:There is now an AdSense help page for Allowed sites.

If you are a Text Link Ads affiliate, you probably received an email like the following yesterday. If you are not a Text Link Ads affiliate, I recommend you join now.

As a Text Link Ads affiliate we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve begun using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure our affiliate referral links. We encourage you to update your affiliate links using the following:

Homepage URL

–

http://tinyurl.com/xxxxxx

Starter Promo URL

–

http://tinyurl.com/xxxxxx

** Please note that our old affiliate urls will no longer work in one week so please update today. Thank you!

This is a very strange move for two reasons.

First, why would they go through tinyurl? Their original referal links were something like: http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=xxxxxx. These link aren’t that long. This new scheme only save 14 character per link. They could have easily saved another 4 character by removing the “www.” from the front of the referral URL, which means they only save 10 character by going through tinyurl. They could have saved another 2 characters by changing the “ref=” to “r=”. Now its only 8 character longer. Is that really a big deal?

Second, why make the old links expire? To me this will just piss off a lot of affiliates who now have to go and change all of their links. The cynic in me is thinking that Text Link Ads is counting on the fact that many of the links won’t get updated, and therefore TLA will no longer have to pay out affiliate percentages on those links?

Text Link Ads usually seems like they are a pretty good organization, but this email completely baffled me.

Darren at ProBlogger has posted about a new AdSense Online Advisory Council that some AdSense publisher have been asked to join. This council will be made up of publishers who will be able to provide feedback to Google and help test out new products. Of course, everything that the members of this council get to know about will be confidential.

It would be interesting to know what the qualifications for membership are. The invitation email starts out with “Congratulations on your success with the AdSense program. Given your extensive experience with AdSense, I’m happy to invite you to join AdSense’s Online Advisory Council”. I wonder what kind of figures Google sees as a “success” and what it considers “extensive experience”. I would guess that Google wouldn’t simply say “anyone who earns more than $x per month and has been in the program for y months gets an invite”. I would think that they would look at other factors such as quality of traffic, and then pick a nice cross section of publishers of different sizes from different niches.

Overall I think it’s a good thing for Google to do. The more feedback they get from publishers the better. I just hope that they kep listen to all of the publishers out there.