AdMoolah News and Views

I finally got around to updating my AdSense Revenue Sharing Site List. It had been over two years since I updated it, so it was getting pretty stale.

When I began editing it, the list had 48 sites on it. I removed 22 sites that were either gone or had removed the revenue sharing from the site. I added in 14 new ones, so there are now 40 sites on the list. I’m sure there are more out there, so feel free to send me any new ones you know about. Hopefully it won’t tale me two years to update it this time.

One new wrinkle I discovered for some sites are affiliate programs. You can sign up as an affiliate and when someone signs up underneath you, you get your own ads displayed on any pages your referrals create.

Because of DK’s SEO Poker Tournament during PubCon next week, I’ve been thinking a lot about poker. And, as always, I’ve been thinking about making money online. Since I’ve been thinking about these things at the same time, I’ve realized that there are some real similarities.

There are a Lot of Dreamers
There are a ton of people who dream about being a professional poker player. A lot of people play a little bit in home poker games, but few ever manage to make a living off of it. It’s the same for internet businesses, a lot of people dream about it and dabble in it, but very few people make a living from it, and even fewer become superstars.

Calculated Risks
Poker is a game of calculated risks. When you start betting, you are never sure that you are going to win a hand. Even if you are holding a pair of aces, someone could easily bet you with a set, straight or flush. However, if you start betting hard every time you have a 2-7 off-suit, you’re not going to make money in the long run. It’s the same with the internet business, most people have a lot of ideas for various sites, however, it’s always best to go with ideas that have the best money-making potential. Try and start with the odds stacked in your favor.

Long Term Strategies are the Best
Every poker player loses a hand every now and then. Everyone in the internet business has an idea that doesn’t work out for the best. The idea is to make money over the long haul. If you keep betting with the right ideas, eventually you come out a winner.

Alway Keep Improving
Poker is a game that you can never be perfect at. Even the best players in the world are constantly changing their strategies and trying out new tactics. The same goes for any Internet business.

Learn From Others
Poker players are constantly studying the competition to find out what the other top players are doing. The same strategy is also very useful in the Internet world. You can study other successful sites and figure out what they are doing right.

Knowing When to Fold ‘Em
Sometimes when playing poker you realize you have been beat and you just have to lay down your cards. The same things applies on the Internet, even though you’ve put time in some project you thought would work, you have to know when to just shut it down and move onto other things.

The Stars do it Over and Over Again
There are alway people in poker who have beginners luck and end up winning some big tournament never to be heard from again. But then there are players like Daniel Negreanu and Scotty Nguyen who keep making money year after year. The same is true of the Internet, you look at people like Jeremy Schoemaker and John Chow who seem to keep raking in the big buck for many years.

As part of the entry process for DK’s Poker Tournament at PubCon everyone has to write a post about a charity that they like – I think that’s a great idea. So here is my post.

Best Friends Animal Society is all about kindness to animals. Their goal is to get the number of animals killed in shelters down to zero. When Best Friends started up in the eighties, about 17 million animals were killed in shelters every year. This number is now down to about 5 million. It’s great to see the number has fallen but there is still a long way to go.

Best Friends takes a very hands on approach to saving animals. They have a sanctuary in Utah where they care of roughly 2000 animals. The main goal is to get these animals treated and ready for adoption, but for those animals that are un-adoptable due to medical or other problems, the sanctuary provides them a permanent place to live. They also work with their members and other groups to provide spay/neuter clinics, shelter and adoption agencies.

My wife and I are big animal lovers and currently have two cats that we adopted from a shelter.

Beside supporting groups like Best Friends, there are other things you can do to help to reduce the number of animals being killed in shelter – make sure you get you pets spayed or neutered, and if you are going to get a new pet, go to a shelter instead of buying one from a pet store.

We (my wife and I) made the decision to go to go to PubCon again this year.

We weren’t too sure if we were going to go or not, but there were two things that tipped the decision:
1) The Vegas Strip Hotel Marketing Departments Keynote Panel – We run Vegas sites, so this should be a very interesting panel for us.
2) DK’s SEO Poker Tournament – This looks like a blast.

We got a pretty good deal at Wynn, so that’s where we’ll be staying this year.

Hope to see you there.

Yesterday AdSense announced a new program policies update. If you read the official announcement, it seems like there really weren’t very many changes.

However, like usual JenSense has done an outstanding analysis of what really changed, and there are some surprises. I would highly recommend reading through this to make sure you understand all the changes.

The O’Reilly Found Conference which I wrote about back in October, has been postponed.

According to the website:

Due to the challenging economic environment, we’re sorry to announce that we’ve made the difficult business decision to postpone the O’Reilly Found Conference, which was to take place June 9-11 in Burlingame, CA.

That’s too bad, because this conference did seem to offer a bit of a different view than most SEO oriented conferences.

The AdSpace conference is going on next week in San Francisco. This looks like its going to be a great event to attend for small publishers who use contextual advertising like AdSense.

If you are interested in going but haven’t registered yet, ShoeMoney is giving away tickets.

The conference features several sessions from AdSense employees, so it will be a good opportuniuty to get some questions answered. In addition there will be some great people like Jennifer Slegg and Jeremy Schoemaker to rub elbows with. I’ll be there as well.

Since AdSense introduced their new interest based ad targeting, they are requiring AdSense publishers to have new privacy policies in place by April 8. That leaves just 5 days to get these in place.

Since I run mostly WordPress sites, I have started using Eric Giguere’s Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress. This seems to do a pretty good job, and hopefully if there are more updates to the AdSense privacy policy requirements, it will be a simple update. You can check out AdMoolah’s privacy policy to see a sample of what it generates.

JenSense also just came up with a good sample privacy policy that you can use with any site.

Techcrunch is reporting that publisher are having some good, early success with MicroSoft AdSense competitor, called PubCenter.

Some quotes from the article:

Our tipster says that he receiving from four times more in revenue Microsoft than Google AdSense. And the money isn’t the only advantage PubCenter has over AdSense. The advertisement themselves are are higher quality than Google’s ads, he says, and equally as targeted towards the content.

We also heard that Microsoft is allowing publishers to get creative with ads by allowing them to set background images. Google AdSense only allows publishers to change the color of the ads.

This could be great news for current AdSense publishers. We need a serious competitor. Yahoo has been trying with its Yahoo Publisher program (which has been languishing in beta since 2005), but most people report being very disappointed by the earnings..

Here is an interesting Google test I came across today. It looks like they are testing putting small icons beside the URL in some ads. Here is a screen shot:

Google is always testing changes like these to a limited set of users to see what affect they have. My guess is that these icons will increase the click-through-rate on these ads. There have been some other reports from people seeing these as well, but my screen shot is the first I’ve heard of a US based search showing these results.

I’m sure if these icons do increase click-through-rates, publishers will like the addition!