We're very excited to let you know about an upcoming feature that lets you easily manage your ad units from within your AdSense account. It isn't live yet, but here's a sneak peek so you'll know what to expect in the coming weeks. (We know many of you have been eagerly anticipating its arrival.)
This new ad management feature means that your ad unit settings (such as colors and channels) for new AdSense for content ad units will be saved in your AdSense account every time you generate ad code. Then, if you'd like to change any of these settings in the future, all you do is make the update within your account -- you'll no longer need to manually replace the ad code on all of your pages. For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300x250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks. Fancy! We hope that this new feature will help you save time and will simplify the process of optimizing your ad units.
As we noted above, please keep in mind that the ad management feature isn't yet available in any publisher accounts. We'll be rolling it out in phases in the next few weeks, and we'll follow up with another post at that time to help you better understand how to use the feature. When you see the "Manage Ads" page appear under your AdSense Setup tab, you'll know the feature is available for you to use.
Source
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Ad changes
Advertisers leap into Facebook
ANY day soon, rumour has it, Apple, Coca-Cola, Condé Nast, General Motors, Nike and a host of other world-famous brand names will sign an advertising deal with the hottest company on the planet.
It’s likely to be one of the most talked-about ad deals of the year. The company they are jockeying to sign up with is attracting 200,000 new users a day. Last week it was valued at $15 billion (£7.3 billion), though it has yet to make a profit.
Facebook is a three-and-a-half year old “social network” site that offers people a way of communicating with their friends online. So far, some 50m people have signed up to it. The company says it expects to break even this year.
Last week, Microsoft beat Google to buy a small stake in the firm, valuing it at $15 billion — more than twice as much as British Airways, a company that made a profit of $602m last year.
For some, the deal indicates a return of the “irrational exuberance” that former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan identified in the mid-1990s — an exuberance that ended when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000.
Facebook is the latest in a series of ever-bigger deals for a new generation of so-called web 2.0 companies.
Once again, internet start-ups with lots of buzz — but next-to-no profits — are being snapped up for huge sums by the world’s big media and technology firms.
For others, including Microsoft, the prices are not irrational but a concrete sign of the value of online advertising.
In recent years, internet advertising has soared as advertisers have shifted more and more of their spending from television, newspapers and other traditional media to a host of websites.
Online advertising is now a $16.5 billion business in America, according to Jupiter Research. Shoppers spend 10% of their money online. Compared with mature advertising markets such as TV (worth $74 billion in America), online advertising spending remains small, but it is growing by about 14% a year, and by 2011 it will be worth $32.1 billion.
Only a small slice of this goes to “social network” sites like Facebook and its larger rival MySpace (owned by Sunday Times parent News Corporation).
This year, according to eMarketer, $900m will be spent advertising on social-networking sites in America and $335m elsewhere. The growth of these sites is phenomenal. Facebook believes with Microsoft’s help it can reach 300m users worldwide in the next few years.
“It’s anybody’s guess how big Facebook will get,” said John Delaney, an analyst with the Ovum consultancy. “But 300m doesn’t sound completely ridiculous.”
Other sites with similar features to Facebook and MySpace have failed to take off — the British site Friendsreunited and America’s Friendster have both been left behind. But the success of Facebook and MySpace shows “there is a market for people to interact on the net in a similar way to the way they interact in real life”, said Delaney.
Advertisers, too, are increasingly enamoured of the sites.
Carlton Cribb, the digital buying director at Zed Media, a London ad agency, said clients now see online sites as an intrinsic part of their advertising strategy.
“In the past couple of years there has been a major change from the clients’ perspective,” he said. “Online was kept very separate from the rest of the budget. Now online is another viable medium for reaching their audience — it’s part of the media mix.” A part of the mix that is growing swiftly.
Social networks collect a lot of personal data about their users. People share their taste in music, books, films, their political views as well as their location. All this information can potentially be turned into well-targeted ads. The danger is that users may turn against the “commercialisation” of the sites.
When Google bought YouTube, the video-sharing website, Delaney said there was a lot of complaining from users, many of whom warned the company to stay away from Facebook.
“We heard the same sort of stuff when News Corp bought MySpace. People moan but they still use MySpace. It’s not the first site to put ads on its website. People understand that they get a lot of cool stuff for free on the internet because it carries ads,” he said.
But the internet is a two-way street, and advertisers now have to figure out how to reach an audience that has the power to talk back in a way that was denied them with more traditional forms of ads.
“That’s the promise and also the danger of social networks,” said Delaney. He points to the success of Arctic Monkeys, the indie rockers who built a following on MySpace.
“They were selling their brand. People will engage with you on a very deep level. The problem is that you are not in control of what is out there.”
Some advertisers have stopped using social-network sites, concerned that their ads will come up alongside unsuitable material put up by the sites’ users.
Cribb said these were problems to which the sites and advertisers were now finding solutions in what are still early days for a rapidly changing medium.
When Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg started the site it offered simple web pages for college students to list information about themselves and send messages to friends. Increasingly the site and its rivals offer an array of services, from e-mail to online photo galleries, that have historically existed independently.
The aim is to make Facebook the first port of call for internet users in the way that many people now have Google as their home page.
It’s not a new strategy — AOL tried something similar and failed and Yahoo, which also courted Facebook, has a similar approach. But Facebook has the buzz and the momentum to more than rattle its rivals. As it adds new services, advertisers will be watching developments as closely as Facebook’s users, Google, MySpace and Yahoo.
Unlike the first internet boom, “big media” has in the main fought shy of paying huge prices for online firms. News Corp bought MySpace in 2005 for $649m and more than recouped its investment with an ad deal with Google worth $900m over three years.
For Microsoft the $240m investment is chump change. But it marks a significant evolution for the software giant as it increasingly moves its muscle online. Whether or not Facebook lives up to its $15 billion promise remains to be seen.
Google algorithm tweak spooks WWW
In the brave new world of online media, fortunes can be won and lost on the whim of Google's key search algorithm.
And when, without warning, Google tweaked that mathematical formula this week, there was panic on the world wide web.
Swarms of bloggers and webmasters of major sites like Washingtonpost.com, Forbes.com, Engadget.com and SFGate.com noticed a downgrading in their PageRank, Google's measure of a web page's value.
A site's PageRank impacts not only its ranking in Google search results but also the price it can charge advertisers. A drop in ranking can have serious financial consequences, especially for smaller operators.
The search giant, through its dominant search engine and AdWords/AdSense network, is relied on by millions of websites not only for traffic referrals but for monetisation as well.
Many websites small and large receive over half of their visitors from Google search referrals. And without a sales team to sign advertising deals, most become AdSense affiliates, automatically connecting them with millions of advertisers worldwide.
Ironically, in the ultimate democracy that is the internet, Google reigns as virtual dictator. By changing the way it ranks sites in search results, it has the power to effortlessly shape the digital economy and manipulate the incomes of millions of web businesses around the world.
Yaro Starak, an Australian entrepreneur whose website, entrepreneurs-journey.com, provides tips on starting an internet business, recently announced he had earned $842 from AdSense in September alone. His total advertising revenue from the blog that month was over $10,000, but Starak's ability to continue charging so much is contingent on him maintaining high site traffic, half of which is referred by Google.
"Google controls the income source for a lot of people online, and we're not talking just search traffic we're talking pay-per-click [AdSense] traffic as well," Starak said in an interview.
"Google has both sides of the fence - they've got the publishers, they've got the advertisers and they've got the search traffic, so that's why they're making so many billions of dollars in money each year."
Indeed, a whole industry has spawned with the aim of helping website operators obtain the highest rankings for certain keywords in search engines, and milk the most out of their AdSense accounts.
But small changes to Google's algorithm that determines how high up in search results a site appears can foil any attempts to game the system in a heartbeat. The worst offenders who are caught trying to artificially boost their search ranking are given the "Google death penalty", whereby they're delisted from search results altogether.
www.theage.com.au
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Making Money Online Through Internet Marketing -- Scam or a New Way of Life?
The book "Digging For Gold Nuggets" was officially launched today on Digging For Gold Nuggets (http://www.DiggingForGoldNuggets.com) as a free resource to assist new internet marketers, highlighting the most common mistakes made in online marketing.
"It is a great pity that so many new internet marketers give up on their dreams of working from home because they are not able to earn enough money online. We simply had to do something to help," said Francois du Toit, full-time internet marketer, author of Digging For Gold Nuggets and founder of Digging For Gold Nuggets dot com. The author's story is not unlike those of many other internet marketers. After spending many years in the corporate world during which time he traveled extensively and did not feel he was spending enough time with his family, he decided it was time to find an alternative way of earning money.
Internet marketing seemed like a great business model. He could potentially reach thousands of customers all over the world, by means of a simple website, and conclude online sales while away from his computer with an automated ordering process.
The practical side of setting up a profitable online business proved to be a lot more difficult than he anticipated due to the many pitfalls that new marketers are not aware of.
The book draws an analogy between the 1848 California gold rush and online marketing. It explains that, as was the case with the California gold rush, many new marketers initiate a new venture, in unexplored territory, without having the right tools and without detailed planning. Those marketers do not strike gold.
What makes Digging For Gold Nuggets special and unique compared to the many other books available on the topic of internet marketing is that this publication gives a very balanced account of what internet marketing is all about, highlighting the pitfalls while offering workable solutions and techniques.
What Francois du Toit clearly points out is that we are all different. There is no "best" way to make money online, there are many ways. What may work well for one marketer may not yield the same results for another marketer.
He stresses that it is important for any new internet marketer to find his or her own area of online specialization and cautions against becoming a "jack of all trades but master of none".
Liveblogging Web 2.0 Summit: Revolution Money's Ted Leonsis And Jason Hogg
Leonsis and Hogg did a presentation describing their new Revolution Money system, which has big plans: To obsolete the way credit cards and PayPal currently operate, using Web 2.0 techniques. It'll be more secure, more flexibile -- and free to merchants.
Leonsis: Can help go after a major industry, which has been neglected by the Web. The world wed all lived in following Moore's Law network effect. Why is credit card interchange costs to merchants going up? The marketplace is close to $60 billion. Each company has continued to raise its prices. Seemed right for revolutionized market.
Could you take those fees, the $60 billion, away from three to five big players and give them back to merchants and consumers.
This business is much bigger than Internet media business and growing at the same rate. For every $100 consumers spend on credit cards, $3 is spent on this business.
"I really believe this business can be transformed by Web 2.0 technologies." It's integrated online and offline payment platform. "It's PayPal meets MasterCharge without the high fees." It's a credit card, prepay card, and ATM card - don't have to have multiple cards.
Card doesn't need name and signature: Introduced first credit card that's PIN-based.
We want to become to social netwowrks what PayPal is to eBay. We believe we can stimulate micropayments. If you use iTunes and buy one song, $0.99, Apple batches payment because they don't want to incur the fees. There are no fees for Revolution Card.
URLs: http://revolutionmoney.com is the Web site. http://revoluioncard.com to fill out an application.
Should be able to send money online: Western Union currently charges $14 for $200. Should be able to send it on the Internet, precharge a card, or withdraw it from an ATM machine.
Hogg: This will be a big deal for college students and minorities.
Leonsis: First deal with AOL and AIM - built into AIM. "It's a major endeavor, lots of technology, and patents involved." Raised $50 million, including from Leonsis.
Major player: Accepted at a million sites in the next 12 months, want hundres of millions of people using it. Will be going live in November. If you're a PayPal power-user, if you have an e-commerce site and don't want to make payments to interchange, if you have fantasy sports. "If you have a large installed base of consumers, we can save you a lot of money."
Value proposition: No name and signature on card, no fee to consumers using it online, 50 basis points, a flat fee, to use it as a credit card. Self-fulfilling marketing, all the merchants want to get those savings so they do the marketing for us.
I didn't know what a "basis point" is, either. It's 1/100th of a percent -- so 50 basis points is one half of one percent.
"Not only is this a new company attacking 1970s mainframe technology, but it's a technology where the partners create the social network."
Jason: "A few years ago, I listenedd to someone from mastercard -- I call him 'my dad' -- talk about their network." They built these mini-internets. Looked into his wallet: Credit card, debit card, gift cars, was using PayPal. This fragmentation was a by-product of having only private networks. He set out to create a new payment platform from scratch.
Can add a line of credit to Revolution Card.
By embedding in social networks, they don't have to leave their current application and go to a secondary application. For example, right-click while in AOL AIM and send message to a buddy.
Can eliminate $0.10-$0.15 per transaction fee online. Want to open up to sales under a dollar. Eliminates huge backlog of microtransactions batched in the systems.
Can use the card to cross-promote between merchants.
25,000 points for an alarm clock, to get immediate gratification at the point of sale.
The New Ad Network for Facebook Widgets Is...Google Adsense?
Amid the gold rush among startups to launch ad networks to monetize Facebook widgets, VentureBeat points out one intriguing new player: Google.
Microsoft has a lock on Facebook page advertising in the U.S., but Facebook has given third party app developers carte blanche to monetize their own apps using any network they please. To date, startups such as RockYou, Lookery, and VideoEgg have gone for that market full-tilt. Is Google diving in as the fly in their soup?
VentureBeat's Eric Eldon suggests this may be Google's toe in the water as it prepares to announce an open platform for Orkut, its big-in-Brazil social network. He also reports that Google has been courting third-party developers in advance of the announcement.
With the entire Facebook economy in throw-it-at-the-wall mode, it stands to reason that Google—or anyone—would dabble. Tomorrow my Epicenter colleague Bryan Gardiner will collect the dish as he attends the Widget Summit 2007 in San Francisco. Stay tuned.
http://blog.wired.com
Yahoo! Does! Adsense! In! Reverse!
Yahoo! today ushered in advertising network deals with three major publishers - Forbes.com, Cars.com and Ziff Davis Media, to add a little sparkle to its Q3 earnings.
The deals represent an unusual twist on the way most advertising networks work e.g. Google or Google - which place bottom feeder ads to soak up the excess inventory of third party publishers. Yahoo! by contrast is offering its own inventory to give page-impression constrained publishers a way of fulfilling bigger campaigns than they could on their own site.
Yahoo! doesn't say how the gig will work out in practice, beyond the fact that affiliates can plunder the entire Yahoo! website to reach their audience targets. The exciting and dangerous way would be to track readers as they move from the publisher websites onto Yahoo! and serve them behaviourally targeted ads commanding premium prices. Exciting? That's the way to make the most money. Dangerous? The cookies would surely crumble into a data protection minefield.
You want Yahoo!'s results? Here's the company statement (PDF).
Now for the one minute version: sales were up 12 per cent to $1.768bn (Q3 06: $1.58bn), operating income fell 26 per cent to $150m (Q3 06: $202m), net income eased a little to $151m ($159m). In the analyst conference call, the company noted an uptick in display advertising and announced the nearly finished rollout of Panama, the new advertising system that is supposed to make Yahoo! compete better with Google. Something is working: the company today revealed it has replaced Google to sell ads on the WebMD health site.
www.theregister.co.uk