AdMoolah News and Views

The Inside AdSense blog today announced that they now have a Known Issues page. This page lists anything that Google is aware of that may cause problems, and possible work arounds.

I’m not sure if this is something that they have been working on for a while and it was just a coincidence that they launched this the day they had a major reporting outage, or if they whipped this together today. My guess is that it’s the former.

This will be a good place to check out if you notice something amiss with AdSense. I’m sure today’s outage caused a lot of publisher to panic (Are my sites down? Did I get banned?) and this should help next time something like this happens.

If the first thing you do in the morning is log into your AdSense control panel, you probably had a little bit of a scare. It looks like the AdSense reports have not been updated since a little after midnight on pacific time. It does look like ads are still displaying normally, so I am assuming impressions and clicks are being counted, just not reported.

AdSense occasionally goes through reporting outages, but this one is much longer than normal.

Update: 3:00pm It looks like things are back to normal now.

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.

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.