The Toronto Star is reporting that only the top 100 blogs make money. Strange, I have 11 blogs that make money, none of which are in the top 100. I have 4, going on 5 blogs that make $1,000 per month. Weirdest part is that a local telephone call would've saved this reporter from writing science fiction for his newspaper.

http://www.thestar.com/article/185610

Two plus weeks ago, I started promoting a FeedBurner ad network called KBCafe. Just over two and we've already sold 10% of the inventory. Today, I dropped one blog from the network because I'm selling it. This'll increase the sold percent (12-13%), but drop the sub count about 20%. I'm looking for people that want to join this network. Normally, a FeedBurner blog only gets ads when an advertiser specifically buy ads on your channel. By joining a network, you get additional exposure and ads. Send me an email, if you'd like to join.

http://networks.feedburner.com/KBCafe

You can also advertise on this network here.
https://www.feedburner.com/ads/add-campaign.do?n=55

Alexa has made some minor changes to its website reporting. They now report exact percentage of Internet users who visit a site, rather than a number of users. They also provide country specific information.

Google has changed their referral payments for both AdSense and AdWords. You get a lot more now. If you are not already signed up, then it's time. Click the buttons below to sign up. The new referral rate follow the buttons.

AdSense Referrals:

• When a publisher who signed up for Google AdSense through your referral earns their first $5 within 180 days of sign-up, you will be credited with $5.
• When that same publisher earns $100 within 180 days of sign-up and is eligible for payment, you will be credited with an additional $250.
• If, in any 180-day period, you refer 25 publishers who each earn more than $100 within 180 days of their respective sign-ups and are all eligible for payout, you will be awarded a $2,000 bonus (bonus payouts are limited to 1 per year).

AdWords Referrals:

• When an advertiser you refer spends $5 within 90 days of sign-up (in addition to the $5 sign-up fee) you will be credited with $5.
• When that same advertiser spends $100 within 90 days of sign-up, you will be credited with an additional $40.
• If, in any 180 day period, you refer 20 advertisers who each spend more than $100 within 90 days of their respective sign-ups, you will be awarded a $600 bonus (bonus payments are limited to 1 per year).

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/02/new-pricing-structure-for-referrals.html

Alec Saunders reported receiving an email from FeedBurner indicating that they are rolling out geo-targeted ads and that his blog was chosen for such an ad. The email follows.

Howdy! Earlier today, you received notification of a new ad at FeedBurner. Unlike other ads, this ad was different. As in can’t-read-it different.

Yep. It was in Russian.

No doubt some of you saw that and said, “Wow. They must love me in Leningrad” and approved the ad without further thought. But most of you, if you’re like us, said, “Umm… Russian?”

Here’s the thing: we quietly rolled out a new capability about 6 weeks ago that allows advertisers to geo-target their ads. Once the advertiser selects the regions where they want to advertise, only people in those regions will see the ads. Pretty cool.

So… we have a new advertiser, for whom we’re doing a bit of a test. They wanted to advertise to tech-savvy individuals in Russia, and hard as this is to believe, we don’t have a ton of tech publishers in Russia. (Yes, we’re working on it.) So we’re trying out the geo-targeting campaign by running their ad across our technology network, but geo-targeted so that only people in Russia will see it.

The only glitch here is that when we trafficked the ad, the Monetize dashboard doesn’t show you that an ad is geo-targeted. So seeing a Russian-language ad can be a bit jarring. So consider this both an announcement of a new feature as well as a head’s up that in the very near future, the approval wizard will have a designation that lets you know when an ad is geo-targeted.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/saunders/~3/89137352/

I just got an email informing me that Amazon cheques now have a $15 cheque fee. That's up from $8 last year. Since Amazon has switched to monthly cheques, that's $180 per year vs $32 last year. I suggest that U.S. residents switch to direct deposit. Others, like me, should either switch to gift certificates or increase your payment threshold on cheques.

Darren Rowse and John of Finding The Money sound off on what what blog advertising solutions work for them and how. Let me follow up their lead.

1. AdSenese - This is my #1 money maker, garnering more than 50% of my earnings.
2. Direct Sales - You need your own domain and a good page rank to start making serious direct sales.
3. FeedBurner - I did well in December, less so in January. I still got my hopes on them. I really like the team. They respond to my complaints, feature requests and questions faster than I can brew a pot of coffee. You want them to win, because they are great people.
4. Amazon - I made money from them, but not thru blogging.
5. BlogAds - Their ad system makes me a couple bucks, but not that much. Their ad server is extremely buggy, the bugs are rarely fixed, they lie that they are fixed, bugs are mostly just patched and thus re-occur.
6. ReviewMe - I made a couple dollars from ReviewMe, but it seemed so contrived and their doesn't appear to be enough advertisers to bother with them.
7. ExpoActive - No support and buggy to hell. In the end, I could no longer approve ads and I had $200 in direct sales just waiting for me. I made a couple bucks for a few months, but eventually got tired of zero support and bugs.
8. Chitika - Once upon a time, I made a lot of money with these guys. It dried up quickly, they failed to pay me on time, lied to me until the cows were dead and I gave up on them.
9. AdBrite - On more than a couple occasions they started running ads that I had not approved, including sex-related ads. Add no support and bugs and I gave up on them. After I removed all my ads, I continued to make a few $ (via bugs in their system) per week for several months, which they gladly paid me.
10. Text Link Ads - I make a bit of money from them, but have never signed up. They advertise a lot thru Google on my various blogs. I need to allocate a little time to trying them out.
11. Clicksor - They paid me so little that I would never had made their minimum withdrawal limit.
12. Bidvertiser - The CPCs they claim and the CPCs I received were on different scales. See Clicksor.

Today, I moved one of my lesser blogs using an HTTP 301 permanent redirect. This is supposedly the best way of moving a blog without losing too much Google juice. In the last month, this blog pulled in between 200 and 600 AdSense pageviews per day, generating about 50 cents per day. Ya, not much. That's why I picked this one for the experiment. I'll report back in a few weeks/months with progress.

I moved the FeedBurner feed by simply editing the source URL. I also ran a search and replace on all the data, replacing the old domain with the new.

Here's a interesting new AdSense clickfraud scam. I got the following email, which was obviously spammed to a domain owners lists of sorts. I cut parts of the email to avoid him getting any further fraudulent clicks.

I have down loaded for 6 months over 400  daily New categories (News-Cats) on the climate problem alone . We are searching for ways to break into internet networks and building our own mainly through the schools and the educational sector. 9 student groups. CEEI get appox 2 million hits. we have 4 major web sites, Climate,( 400,000 stories) Pollutied streams 30,names listed , and Species in trouble , and Detour (over 150 specis a day are going extinct 100 a day 10 years ago). ducumented by the WCU.

Check out <[web address cut]>we have almost 400,000 articles from all over the world that are impacting ( one way or another ) the planet. I have my own ideas why things are happening the way they do, on the other hand are "we" all just justifying the status quo and perpetuating a system that is disfunctual ? the net is the only hope we have for getting these kinds of problems solved.

The webpage I cut above has Google AdSense for Domains, so if you click thru to his articles, you are actually clicking on AdSense links and he's getting paid for them. I've reported him and he'll obviously get the boot pretty quickly.

This weekend, I put a little effort into a new FeedBurner FAN feature called My Networks. I previously setup a KBCafe network, but now I've added all my top blogs and turned on ads. If anybody wants to join this network, then please ping me [randy@kbcafe.com]. Right now, the network has a circulation of 14,000+. The higher the circulation, the better chance we have of standing out in a croud. Currently, there are no ads running on the network, but I just enabled ads yesterday.

About a year ago, I found phone numbers in some AdSense CPC ads. A year later and I found them again. Phone numbers in CPC ads defeat the entire purpose of AdSense. The Minnesota Wild Tickets ad shown in blue on light blue with a red rectangle is a screen shot and is not real.

Please don't click on any ads on this page as I don't want any advertisers incurring invalid costs.

I just found this note on Google's site which says you can specifically call attention to your AdSense referral units. When did this policy change happen? I guess I have a rather big new source of funds.

Actively endorse the products you refer. Unlike with AdSense for content ads, we encourage you to endorse referral products by calling attention to the button or text link. If you believe in the quality of the product that you're referring, feel free to let your users know! Of course, in line with our policies, you may not click your own ads nor encourage conversions for deceitful reasons.