Does The AdSense URL Hurt Publishers?

I never thought of it before, but The New York Times reports on a survey by DoubleClick, which claims that twice as many people look at online ads and visit them later, as opposed to those who click on it. What it means:
Of visitors who see ads on your website, 30 percent admit to sometimes clicking on an ad.
Meanwhile, 61 percent look at the ad, process it, and visit the advertiser later, without clicking on the ad.
With Pay-Per-Click advertising getting enormously popular, that means that publishers who display PPC ads never get paid, even though their ads are effective for that 61%.
The 61% is a complete validation of the idea of brand advertising, that it is indeed twice as useful to get your name in the minds of visitors, as it is to get them to click.
Google has ads that pay out for just being shown, but it has no type of ad that combines payments for clicks with payments for showing the ad.
If three times as many people visit an advertised site as those who are actually reported on clicking on it, then publishers are losing a ton of money. What can be done?
Well, one option is for Google to stop showing the advertiser’s URL in ads, or at least let publishers turn it off optionally. Advertisers should have to pay a more complicated structure, with ads that include a website URL costing more money than those who don’t. Google should also introduce a combo ad, one that combines CPM (pay for ad impressions) with CPC (pay for ad clicks), charging a complex formula that charges less for impressions and more for clicks.
A combo ad wouldn’t work everywhere, as there are a lot of cheats in the AdSense system, but high-level trusted publishers should have access to it. Advertisers should have the option of getting their ads in at a lower cost-per-click than rival bidders, if they agree to pay for impressions. As an example, an ad that bid $10 per click would be considered equal to an ad that bid $3 for 1,000 impressions as well as $9 per click.
Am I crazy? Would a third type of ad payment kill Google’s ad system and overcomplicate things, or would advertisers welcome an opportunity to get lower per-click ads in the system by paying up front? No one can argue that PPC is perfect, and the Times article makes that clear. I’d like a combo ad as an option that might make everyone happy.
(via Amit Agarwal, who suggests a different AdSense change that might make the ads more user-friendly)

Danny Sullivan has said he will be doing a new search blog after leaving Search Engine Watch at the end of this month, but nobody expected it to be th

Haochi Chen noticed that Picasa Web Albums now lets you pay them even more money for more storage. Besides 6.25 gigabytes for 25 bucks, you can now get:
25GB ($100 per year)
100GB ($300 per year)
250GB ($500 per year)
If you’re a serious heavy-duty uploader, this is just great. Flickr places limits on Pro accounts that can’t be increased; there’s no amount of money you can throw at them to get more than two gigs of upload bandwidth per month. At two gigs a month, it’d take over ten years to get 250 gigs of images online, and you’d pay $250 to do it. With Google, you pay $500 per year, and you can throw ‘em all online right now. Having different options is great for everyone.

Danny Sullivan Poaches Search Engine Watch With New Blog

Danny Sullivan has said he will be doing a new search blog after leaving Search Engine Watch at the end of this month, but nobody expected it to be this dramatic: Danny is launching Search Engine Land with the same damn cast he had at SEWatch! SELand will feature Danny, Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz, in other words, 2/3 of the editors and SEW’s most prominent regular correspondent are leaving, all in the course of a few weeks.
Holy crap, I think we just saw Technorati’s #66 blog die. Wow.
Most likely, the owners of Search Engine Watch will try to keep the blog going because, obviously, it is a money-maker and gets publicity for their conferences, but one has to believe they’ve just been screwed royally, and would have a tough time recovering. If there was ever a test of the strength of blogs as brands, this is going to be it.
Here’s what Barry says at Threadwatch:
I am not on contract. I do it month to month and I am leaving Nov. 30th with Danny.
Chris’s contract is up at the end of the year and he is coming over the first week of January.
Get the feed.
I’m glad to see Danny stick it to “the man”, go it alone, and probably beat his old company, but I am shocked that this sort of thing wasn’t covered in a non-compete. I mean, I could see a contract being nice enough to let him work as a competitor, but let him take half the staff with him? Wow, what a coup. Lisa Barone says Incisive, the owners of SEW, must be certifiable for allowing this to happen.
Via Andy Beal, another guy who wrote a major, company-owned blog, and left and struck out on his own. For the record, Andy’s self-operated search blog, Marketing Pilgrim, has already trounced his old one, Search Engine Lowdown. Good luck, SEW, and likely, goodbye.
UPDATE: Holy cow, SEW must be really over. Danny announces at Search Engine Land that they will be joined by Phil Bradley, Bill Slawski, Jennifer Slegg, Brian Smith, and Greg Sterling. That leaves Search Engine Watch with just one editor, Elisabeth Osmeloski, and one contributor, Detlev Johnson. Seriously, when you take 7 out of 9 from someone else’s staff, you aren’t building an organization, you’re completing a raid. Unbelievable.
At this point, I have to ask if Incisive is going to just shut down Search Engine Watch. Considering that they were supposedly making Chris Sherman the new head of the Search Engine Strategies conference, shut they just close up shop and turn off the lights on the way out?
On the flip side, if Danny is just recreating the same company, I wonder if he plans to do a new conference. Based on the name of the site, I recommend he goes in a different direction, and create “Search Engine Land”, a search theme park. There can be rides like the PageRank roller coaster, the Banned-From-Google Haunted House, the Yahoo acquisition ferris wheel, and the Microsoft-muscling-into-a-new-market bumper cars. Got any others?

Andy Beal Wants To Give You An iPod

Andy Beal is giving away an iPod Shuffle to an eagle-eyed RSS subscriber, with readers who spot a special RSS ad being entered in a drawing to get the super-tiny music player. The idea is to drive RSS subscriptions, and to encourage people to spread word of the contest, the prize gets better the more people that subscribe. If 2,500 people subscribe (Feedburner currently reports 1,219 readers), the prize becomes the new metal nano, and if 4,000 subscribe, it will be a shiny video iPod (presumably the 30-gig version).
It’s a pretty good way to get subscribers, assuming contestants spread the word (as I am doing right now). Another good thing to have are backlinks, so I would suggest Andy also ask readers to link to the giveaway on their blogs, and counting new Technorati links to the total for upping the prize. Imagine getting 1,000 neww Technorati links; that would be worth an iPod to me.

PayPal 2 Google: We Can Throw TWICE As Much Money Down The Toilet!

One of the most god-awful stupid promotions I’ve ever seen was when Google started offering $10 off $30 or higher purchases made with Google Checkout at select stores. The savings were great for the consumer, but it inspired zero loyalty in anything, just a huge loss-leader that may turn out to have accomplished nothing.
Well, PayPal has decided it needs to throw away twice as much money as Google did! Between November 23 and December 15, purchases of $50 or more at participating retailers, including Dell, Sharper Image and Barnes & Noble, will earn a one-time $20 credit to their PayPal account. Google’s discount was good an unlimited amount of times, but it was only ten dollars and at less stores, so eBay’s PayPal unit stands to lose a hell of a lot more money.
I don’t understand it. I may not have an economics degree, but I can’t see what the benefit is in giving away free money. The retailers aren’t stupid, and know that any increased sales are due to the savings, and thus have no reason to be loyal to PayPal, and the customers don’t care, since they’re just looking for the latest bargain. Have both companies just gone off the deep end?(via Ben’s Bargains)
UPDATE: Jeez, Google has a response: $10 bonus for signing up for Google Checkout. Sign up before this Sunday, and get ten dollars off your first purchase (expires at the end of the year). Really, will this (a) be a great way to save ten bucks, or (b) drive billions of dollars into Google’s pockets and inspire customer loyalty? Oh, the first one? Really?(via SlickDeals)

What List Are You On?

Frank Arrigo links to Kineda, which now has a widget which queries Technorati to determine where you go in the blogging hierarchy, from the A-List to the D-List. Frank’s happy to be on the B-List, but I’m shocked that I am apparently an A-Lister:
The Very High Authority Group (500 or more blogs linking in the last 6 months)In the final group we see what might be considered the blogging elite. This group, which represents more than 4,000 blogs, exhibits a radical shift in post frequency as well as blog age. Bloggers of this type have been at it longer – a year and a half on average – and post nearly twice a day, an increase in posting volume of over 100% from the previous group. Many of the blogs in this category, in fact, are about as old as Technorati and we’ve grown up together. Some of these are full-fledge professional enterprises that post many, many times per day and behave increasingly like our friends in the mainstream media. As has been widely reported, the impact of these bloggers on our cultures and democracies is increasingly dramatic.
Plus, it’s nice to know that InsideMicrosoft is firmly on the B-List:
How many people can claim to have one of each?
Personally, I think the site’s determination of an A-Lister is too broad, but I’m not gonna complain about my personal results

Yahoo Facing A Crossroads

The thing everyone needs to pay attention to is a memo by Yahoo Senior VP Brad Garlinghouse, one that lays out what the rest of the world is complaining about Yahoo, its flaws and mistakes, and demands a new direction before things sort of fall apart.
One mistake he focuses on is Yahoo’s redundancies (Flickr/Photos, Del.icio.us/MyWeb, Music/Musicmatch, Messenger plugins/Widgets), several products doing the same thing. While there is nothing wrong with taking more than one shot at a particular problem, Yahoo is showing a crisis of confidence, unable to believe in anything and put their support behind some great products. Instead, they compete with themself, and don’t win anything because their customers have no idea in what direction they are heading.
We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything — to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.
…
I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.
I hate peanut butter. We all should
There’s so much in there that is right on, and needs to be read by everyone at every tech company. Yahoo is a great company in a bad dry spell, but is filled with so much talent that it can rise again. If leaders like Brad take control of the wheel, we are going to see something amazing. Microsoft is in the middle of a recovery, one that is working, albeit slowly, and I’m convinced Yahoo’s depression is shallow enough that they can still recover before Microsoft does.
Otherwise, with a $36 billion (and shrinking) market cap, Yahoo will get bought by somebody who sees the real opportunity there. I’ve got news: Yahoo has so many pageviews, any large company can justify the acquisition.
Everybody’s talking about the memo. John Battelle says that Yahoo’s COO has asked Garlinghouse to head a group looking into these issues. A VC notes the lost opportunities in Yahoo’s acquisitions. Arrington says it may be more of a power move by Garlinghouse, to grab credit if already proposed changes are a success, and at the very least, either Brad or Terry Semel will have to go. Mini-Microsoft has great comments about how this pertains to and reflects on Microsoft. Dave Winer goes the other way.
The Times says Yahoo’s problem is monetization, that it reaches more people than any other, but can’t make the money it should from those eyeballs. That makes me wonder: What if several major web companies all bought Yahoo together, in order to run it as a central web portal that pointed to all the partner’s properties? While I don’t think the web needs to be centralized, I do think a lot of money could be made in a concerted effort. Imagine Google running search, video and e-mail, News Corp running social networking and old media, and other companies providing other services, all in some sort of “Mall of the Internet”? It’s an awful idea, creatively and innovatively, but think of the money!
Beyond that, it looks like Yahoo seems to think the holiday shopping season applies to corporate acquisitions. Valleywag reported Yahoo picked up MyBloglog, a blog stats/community site; Download Squad reported that Yahoo bought Bix, a social contest service, and GigaOm reported that Yahoo acquired Kenet Works, a Swedish mobile company. It turns out that Yahoo didn’t actually buy MyBlogLog, but is in talks to do so. Still, everybody’s talking about Yahoo, but is anyone willing to bet on them?

Search Engine Thanksgiving Logos 2006

google, yahoo and Ask are showing off special Thanksgiving Day logos in the US today; Thanksgiving is celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November, often with an accompanying Thanksgiving feast with a turkey. In this year and past years, Google always shows the turkey being served the food, not being the food itself

Record historique pour l'action Google (Goog) aujourd'hui au Nasdaq

Record historique pour l'action Google (inside google) aujourd'hui au Nasdaq:
En effet, le cap tant attendu des 500$ vient d'être dépassé avec un cours en séance de 505,35$ (cours à 10h04 heure de New York, contre 495,05$ hier à la cloture) ce qui porte la capitalisation boursière de la société à plus de 153 Milliards de $.
Consultez les cours de l'action GOOG sur Google Finance