Highlights From the Last Two Weeks
I have not been able to blog for the past two weeks for a variety of reason: a crashed hard drive, a vacation and some business travel. This post will highlight some of the interesting things that happened in the AdSense world and beyond.
Some animated backgrounds were spotted on AdSense ads. These ads had some animated arrows on them. See JenSense and ProBlogger for more coverage.
The AdSense Firefox referral program is now available to international publishers. See JenSense and ProBlogger for more coverage.
Google is testing Click-To-Call ads. Ads are appearing in search results that have a small phone icon beside them. When you click it you can enter your phone number and be directly connected to the advertiser. The feature is not available to publishers yet, but it will be interesting to see the payouts for this when they do. See ProBlogger for more coverage.
Chitika made some publishers very unhappy by slashing revenue in audited reports. Chitika seemed to be on their way to becoming a major player in the small publisher advertising space, but this knocked a lot of wind out of their sails. People were very upset that the revenue they will actually receive is much less than they thought it was going to be. See JenSense, Eric Giguere and ProBlogger for more coverage.
New background colors for Firefox referral buttons were released. Some of the buttons are now available with blue and orange backgrounds. See JenSense for more coverage.
Eric Scalf Said,
December 6, 2005 @ 3:02 am
Chitika has also been pegged as using misleading copy in their ads, and posibally using an insecure backend.
Essentially, the copy on their “description” tab lists “Best Deals at ____” where the listed merchant may not offer the best deal. Also, Jeremy (from Shoemoney) discovered Chitika is using the notoriously insecure PostNuke as the backend for their reporting/publisher admin structure. It’s been a bad month for Chitika, all around.