I got an email from AdBrite today. There sending me my first cheque. Thanks! It's not much, but at least it's something. I'm using AdBrite primarily to test it and report the results here, so here's an update report. I find a lot of the ads I'm receiving are risqué (mostly sex related). I do much better w/ AdSense and Amazon Associates, but then I don't really give AdBrite good placement.

http://www.adbrite.com/mb/?spid=4216

Adotas: Yesterday Google’s AdWords team announced they had been testing two new image ad formats. The first, a large 2560 x 1920 image is designed for advertisers who want to appear “larger than life,” [cut] The second format, a 1 x 1 pixel ad can be purchased in blocks of ten by keyword.

http://www.adotas.com/2006/03/google-adwords-unveils-two-new-image-sizes/

It turns out that if you search for Oleg Dulin on MSN you get the real truth. A pretty awesome April fools joke for your SEO friends.

http://www.msnsearchspoof.com/

Google has created their own mash-up of Google Maps (a.k.a. Google Local) and Google Adwords. These are called Local Business Ads and they show up on Google Maps.

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=34036

http://youtube.com/watch?v=W0d59zTKtNA

PR: Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it intends to issue 5,300,000 shares of its Class A common stock. This offering will partially meet the anticipated needs of index funds to purchase Google Class A common stock when Google is added to the S&P 500 Index at the close of trading on March 31, 2006.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/ir_20060329.html

Randy: Hmmm! This is Google's 3rd offering already. Let me ask two questions.

1. Would you sell your shares in any company if you thought those shares were over-valued?
2. Who do you think best knows the value of a company's stock?

Jon Watson is trying a new method of monetizing his podcasts. He calls it the 1-penny podcast project. You pay him 1 penny per download of his podcast and he promotes you during the podcast.

http://www.jonwatson.ca/1PPP

Pesach Lattin: Our friends at MassDestraction.com [cut] are running Yahoo PPC ads [and Google AdSense]. In order to get more clicks, they’ve placed rotating photos of attractive young ladies that are the same size as the ads, so people who see these vixens click on the ads. It’s innovative, but extremely unethical and seemingly fraudulent. (But it works!)

http://www.adotas.com/2006/03/sexy-girls-get-you-fraudulent-clicks/

Randy: Anybody wanna place bets on when this publisher is gonna start whinning about his accounts getting banned?

Matt Cutts: This tip is simple: don’t bury words in an image, especially if those words don’t appear in normal, index-able text.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-use-text/

From Digital Point:

Open Notepad. Go to File, and Choose Open.

If you have Windows 95, 98, or ME browse to the folder "C:\windows"

If you have Windows XP Home browse to the folder "C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc"

If you have anything else (Windows XP Pro, Windows 2000, NT,  2003, etc.) browse to the folder: "C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc"

Once you're there, open the file called "hosts". If you don't see anything listed just type the word hosts and the  file should open up. Just the word "hosts", no extension or anything after that. It's probably blank but it might not be.

Add this line:

127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com

And save.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=44373

AdsBlacklist.com is a Website with a database of low-paying AdWords ads that you can block via the AdSense ad filter. I'm not a proponent of filtering ads, neither have I tried it.

http://www.adsblacklist.com/

Andrew Johnson: As I reported a few days ago, Markus Frind, the owner of the free dating site PlentyOfFish.com has been pulling in $10,000 a day from Adsense.

Randy: Read the entire interview between Andrew and Markus.

Google is integrating the Google Base database into their primary SERPs. I've not been able to duplicate (it might be regionally restricted), but it seems that on many searches, Google will present a Refine your search form to search into Google Base.

http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=947

Google has made their Adwords Keyword Tool public. You no longer have to log-in to gain access to this invaluable data.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

SERoundtable: AdWords customers are complaining that it can take a month or more for Google to review any ads submitted that require manual Google review.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003552.html

Nathan Weinberg is reporting that Google Print Ads are failing. I noticed that Google has closed the auction test Webpage.

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

Earlier this month, I noticed a jump in my Amazon earnings. The news continues to get better, I've sold over $1,000 of Amazon crap in the last 7 days with more than $100.00 in associate earnings. Also, I've sold at least one item in every day but one this month and as many as 13 in one day. I haven't changed or added any new Amazon links this entire month and I've been on vacation for the last 2 weeks. The sudden rise is quite unexpected, mostly gains in the SERPs, I think.

http://associates.amazon.com/

Google has launched an AdSense Google Group.

http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help

I checked EhList this morning and found kbcafe.com (my primary domain) had 1,050,000 Webpages in the Google index. It's also got a Technorati ranking of 448, which I've never seen before.

http://ehlist.ca/show/34

Leslie Walker: After analyzing where and when each click came from, auditing firm ClickFacts Inc. estimated that 35 percent of the referrals that Radiator paid Google for stemmed from bogus traffic. [cut] Thys said his firm will present the report to Google and Yahoo and request a refund for the invalid clicks.

Randy: I simply don't understand this attitude about click-fraud. It's like this. Each click has a cost, whether it's fraud or not. These clicks translate to sales and those sales have a defined value. If sales exceeds costs, then shut up. Otherwise, don't use AdWords. If click-fraud is really as bad as they say, then Google will lose all their advertisers who follow this simple advice and their profits will quickly turn into massive losses. It's Google's benefit to rid their network of click-fraud and from what I see, they are doing a reasonable enough job. Of course, everybody wants to push the lawsuit button and get a lottery ticket instead of trying to run a legit business.

I got my first AdBrite intermission ad today. I accepted the ad and you'll be getting them on KBCafe now. If you bump into one, then please leave a comment here and tell me what you think. I haven't encountered one yet. Don't know what to expect. I want to evaluate the earnings versus the cost (pissed off users).

http://www.adbrite.com/mb/intermission_splash.php

Guru Prabhakara, AdSense Publisher Support: Please share your AdSense story with us. [cut] We'd love to hear about all the ways AdSense has worked for you so that we can continue to improve our program.

When Google Base first went live, I did some testing, found it did work very well at all and submitted some support requests. Several months later, I got a response.

Your bulk upload file appears to be an XML file. Unfortunately, our system won't process XML files correctly unless their filenames end with the ".xml" extension.

Amazing!

ClickZ: Google has agreed to settle a class action click fraud case brought in an Arkansas state court for up to $90 million.

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3590251

Randy: And the lawyers shall inherit the earth.

I noticed that my conversion rate for Amazon Associates has increased a lot (more than doubled) in the last few months. I've always thought of Amazon's Associates as a failed program that had a lot of promise. I haven't added any new links or changed any code, but I'm clearly selling a lot more stuff. Last quarter (Q4 2005), I sold 21 items. I sold 20 items in the last 7 days. Is Amazon getting serious about affiliate sales?

https://associates.amazon.com

I created a little widget for subscribing to all Google blogs via email. Simply put your email in the edit box, hit submit and you'll get an email to activate your subscription.

I was amazed today to find out that the word partner is not allowed in AdWords ad text, because it's a trademarked word. WTF?

Sometimes, I have a rather large page with AdSense on it and I can't figure out why I'm getting PSAs. I know it must be AdSense stop words, but hell if I can search the entire page for every stop word and delete them all. So, I created a Webform that does that for me. And you can use it too! Simply enter your Webpage in the input control and it'll scan it for possible stop words.

Google has announced that shortly you'll be able to break down how much your making via AdSense with CPM and CPC ads.

We now offer more detailed reports about the type of ad targeting you're displaying on your pages. See how much of your traffic is viewing site-targeted CPM ads and how much is viewing contextually-targeted CPC ads. To view separate reports for contexual targeting and site targeting, visit your Advanced Reports page. From there, choose AdSense for content as the product, select to show data by individual ad unit, and click the checkbox marked Show data by targeting type - contextual or site.

https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=32591

This option is not currently available to me. I'll report back when it does.