GoogleRumours: We just spotted a video AdSense ad.

In typical Google fashion, eCPM is explained.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/02/ecpm-what-exactly-is-that.html

I just noticed that I have my first PR7 Webpage. That's actually a brand new domain, but the R-mail service has been quite popular even its first few months. It's like finding out your one-year-old is a genius.

http://www.r-mail.org/

For most of February, I've been testing BlogAds on a couple blogs. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied. As you can see, this week I'm running a BlogAds ad for 5 Star Affiliate Programs. This blog actually gets very little traffic compared to my main blogs and yet somebody is interested in advertising specifically on this blog. That's pretty good. And the money is pretty decent too! The best part is that you can run BlogAds along side AdSense and diversify your revenue stream. On the downside, I find it unintuitive setting up a new blog strip or trying to place an ad on a blog. The wizard isn't clear, can be slow and fails all-too-often.

http://www.blogads.com/

Google Blog: As the number of Google services has increased, we've continued to build on our core payment features and migrate to a standard process for people to buy our services with a Google Account. [cut] We also just began offering similar functionality on Google Base. Looking ahead, we want to continue building payment services that meet the needs of Google users and advertisers. We expect to add payment functionality to Google services where our users need a way to buy online.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/update-on-payments_24.html

Google Base: To help users more easily purchase and sell Google Base items, we're planning to enable people to buy items on Google Base using their Google Accounts.

http://googlebase.blogspot.com/2006/02/buying-on-google-base.html

Google: We've recently expanded the image ads we offer to include animated image ads.

https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=20107

I'm struggling with AdBrite and wondering how many others are in the same boat. I consult with quite a few Website authors and the general feedback is the same, "struggling with AdBrite". In early February, AdBrite started running network ads on pages where they were not approved.  This was fixed after a few days.

Now, for the last five days, AdBrite has stopped running network ads on pages where I allow them. I submitted a support request in the first day or two. Two days later, I received a lazy response asking me questions about the easily tracked problem. I answered immediately and have not heard back again.

Not that I make a lot of money on AdBrite network ads. 90+% of my AdBrite revenue is from direct ads (non-network), still I'm down a few bucks with no acceptable response from AdBrite. Maybe, if I blog it.

Chris Gilmer: It looks as thoough Google has updated PageRank at a bunch of Google Data centers.

http://google.weblogsinc.com/2006/02/19/google-pr-update/

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/02/ad-rank-explained.html

CEO of Chitika, Venkat Kolluri has sent me an email reguarding them not sending me my money. He says that Chitika is not paying me because I haven't sent them a W8. Let's recap.

1. Chitika requested a W8 from me on Friday January 27th (7 PM). The money was to be paid by January 30th.
2. Venkat says that they sent this request several times. I received one request, the others must have been eaten by my SPAM filter or Venkat is lying.
3. On February 2nd, the U.S. government took the W8 form offline. A note indicated that the form would be reposted February 17th. That would be today and it's not online.
4. On February 8th, I sent Chitika an email and they responded that I'd get the money that week and blamed the situation on high volume. No mention of the missing W8.

My recommendation: Chitika is a complete fraud. Don't bother signing up.

I run a few Expoactive ads here and there to get an idea how well they perform. They perform very well, not as good as AdSense, but well enough. I've noticed two real problems with the ad format.

1. Quite often, the content of the ads will bleed outside of the parent element, that is, I can set the parent to 100 pixels wide, but if Expoactive ad needs 150 pixels, then it'll bleed thru the right border of the parent and overlap any content immediately to the right of the parent.
2. The ads I'm receiving are badly written. One has a typo in the Website URL. Another has the title 'Ad Headline', the description 'Description Line One Description Line Two' and the URL 'www.website.com'. A third is missing it's title. And those are my top three performing ads. Advertisers must be getting ripped.

http://www.expoactive.com

Nielsen: The number of sponsored link advertising impressions on the Google and Yahoo! ad platforms grew 16 percent, from 55.4 billion to 64.3 billion, between August 2005 and January 2006.

http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_060216.pdf

About: Collapsing ad units are an optional advanced feature of alternate ads - the collapsing ad unit code will 'collapse' your ad unit so that it takes up no page space if there are no targeted ads available.

https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=10527

Randy: Over the last year, I've tried all sorts of alternate ads that display when AdSense can find appropriate ads. My only success story was Chitika, but that was temporary. This is the last resort, since there does not appear to be any viable AdSense alternates that generate significant revenues.

JenSense: MSN ContentAds is their contextual advertising program name and a launch date will be sometime in 2006.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/02/contentads_the.html

Google has started a Chinese blog.

http://www.googlechinablog.com/

Google Blog: we're happy to welcome BearingPoint, one of the largest IT and management consulting firms on the planet, as a partner. They're putting Google search into practice -- a new Search Solutions Practice group, that is.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/best-practices.html

I've been experimenting with AdBrite network ads. The purpose was to figure out how much AdBrite network ads paid compared to AdSense. I did this on one blog and the results are likely different on other blogs and other Webpages. The results were that AdBrite paid less, but not substantially less and I'll be continuing the experiment. I did find that AdBrite continues to have technical issues, which can cause your Website to appear not to respond. On the plus side, AdBrite non-network ads remain a great compliment to AdSense.

I had to remove the AdSense ads from the test blog, because it is against Google politices to run AdBrite network ads on the same Webpage as AdSense. You can have AdBrite non-network ads on the same Webpage, something I do all the time.

I tried to create an AdWords text ad with the term Olympics in it.

Due to trademark reasons, we do not allow advertisers to use 'olympics' in their Google AdWords ads.

Unbelievable! The word Olympics predates trademarks. What's next? Maybe I'll trademark "World War II" or "The Dark Ages" and make a mint licensing them. I notice that some companies are using it, I wonder how they got the exemption?

Microsoft has expanded its Beta of Windows Live Expo to include employees of many Seattle area companies. Live Expo is a listings services similar to Craigslist and Google Base.

http://expo.live.com/

Elinor Mills: Yahoo confirmed on Wednesday that it's polling some Yahoo Mail users about what they would want in exchange for making Yahoo their primary search engine.

http://news.com.com/2061-10811_3-6037090.html

List of rewards follow. A more verbose list is found in Elinor's article.

• No Yahoo Mail ads.
• Unlimited Yahoo Mail storage.
• Outlook Access to Yahoo Mail.
• Five free music downloads a month.
• Discounted music subscriptions.
• Donations to charity.
• PC-to-phone calling credit.
• Netflix discount.
• Discounted Yahoo Personals subscription.
• Frequent flyer miles.

http://devinreams.com/2006/02/08/myspace-ads-suck/

Google: As you may know, as part of Google's ongoing effort to develop new opportunities for our advertisers, we've been running tests of ads in a limited number of print publications. Now, we're excited to test an auction of ad space in select magazines.

http://services.google.com/marketing/links/aw-print-pub-ads/

Randy: And they have a great selection of top magazines to choose from.

For some reason, I thought about the December Chitika payments and realized, hey that should'a been paid at the end of January. Here we are February 8th and where's the money? I fired off an email and they replied...

Sorry for the delay in payments. Due to the high volume we send, they have to go out in batches. So someone may get theirs before you, and you before theirs. We have processed most paypal payments and will be starting on checks. You should receive your payment this week. Thank you for your patience while we work on speeding up the payment process.

Ya right! Anybody else in this boat? You might want to ping Chitika while they are still in business.

Google Sitemaps now include a robots.txt analysis tool. I'm pretty comfortable writing robots.txt files, but for those that aren't, this is likely the best (only) tool available.

AdSense bits is a new blog where the author is posting emails he is sending to AdSense and the response from AdSense. Currently, there are only two entries. The author is looking for other AdSense publishers to submit their emails too. I'm unsure if publishing emails from AdSense support is against the AdSense terms of service. I assume that Google would be glad to see their users getting informed.

http://www.adsensebits.com/

Chris Beasley: Amazon is apparently looking into the feasibility of starting their own ad network like Adsense.

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/02/04/amazon-sense/

Randy: If Amazon Associates worked, then an Amazon CPC wouldn't even be necessary. If Amazon comes out with a CPC program as bad as their associates program, then Google and Yahoo! have nothing to fear.

Google Analytics has a new feature called Site Overlay. It gives you an visual representation of a Webpage and the value of each link on the page. I don't find if very useful, but thought some would.

Philipp Lenssen: From what it looks like, the German websites of car maker BMW have been kicked out of the Google index. [cut] The reason for the ban is likely to be that the BMW websites have been caught employing a technique used by black-hat search engine optimizers: doorway pages.

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-02-04-n60.html

Matt Cutts: This week our webspam team continued ramping up our anti-spam efforts by removing bmw.de from our index. [cut] That’s a violation of our webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/

My Google Analytics data has not been updated since early Friday. It's usually less than 12 hours behind, but is now more than 48 hours behind.

A big thanks to Tinu of FreeTrafficTip.com, who provided me with the BlogAds invite. As you can see, I'm running BlogAds in the right sidebar, just above my AdSense skyscrapper. At first glance, it seems that BlogAds is not a very good AdSense alternative for PSAs and blanks. As an alternative to AdSense and even a complimentary ad network, it looks great. I've read on countless forums that you can run BlogAds and AdSense side-by-side, like I use to do with eMinimalls. I'll report back on successes. Please leave tips in the comments. Thanks again Tinu.

http://www.blogads.com/

BlogAds have a blog and an RSS feed. Subscribed

It would seem that YPN has started banning some accounts that are participating in non-U.S. traffic. Here's a sample from one of the banned publishers.

We have terminated your Yahoo! Publisher Network beta account [ACCOUNT ID] for breach of the Terms and Conditions and/or Program Policies. Your breach includes but may not be limited to sending traffic from users located outside the United States, in violation of Section 11(l) of the Terms and Conditions. In accord with Section 6(a), we will not include such amounts in your payment. We have refunded amounts generated from the non-US users to our advertisers and will pay any remaining amount owed to you in accord with the Terms and Conditions.

Just to clarify, sections 6(a) and 11(l) of YPN's Terms and Conditions are reproduced here.

6 Payment.

a. Overture's payment to you will be based on the net revenue earned by Overture from the Matched Ads displayed on Your Site and/or Your RSS Feed(s) to human users within the United States.

11 Abuse of Services. You agree not to:

l. display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US;

In other words, if you display YPN ads to users outside of the US, you can get banned? WTF?

Inside Adwords: Last week, we quietly launched a beta version of AdWords Editor -- our downloadable AdWords account management application which allows you to quickly and easily navigate your account and make changes.

http://www.google.com/adwords/editor/

Randy: Unless you previously signed up for AdWords market research (see User Preferences), odds are you won't have access to this client.