Add Images To Gmail’s Interface Xoopit is a Firefox plugin that adds dynamic image preview to Gmail. You see a strip of images above your email, and there’s some sort of social networking theory at work.
H-1B Visa Situation the Usual Giant Disaster
Read at Techdirt about the H-1B (foreign guest worker) visas, which are once again running into problems due to the government not providing enough visas for American tech companies to bring skilled workers to this country. As usual, the visas for the entire year ran out in a single day, and the Department of Homeland Security is doing what it can to keep those jobs in the U.S. by allowing certain industry grads to stay in the country longer on their student visas.
Google Earth Adds Street View Google Earth now has Street View built into it, in order to see street level photos of buildings and pedestrians. Not only that, but you can blow the Street View full screen, in order to gawk at total strangers having their privacy invaded in the utmost fidelity.
Google Most Valuable Brand Again Google has been named the most valuable brand by market research firm Millward Brown Optimor, value at $86 billion and beating out GE and Microsoft ($71 billion apiece). Google’s brand value grew 30% over the last year, though Google has now won three years running.
Earth Day Search Logos
Search Engine Land has a bunch of logos that ran on Earth Day, including this one from Google:
Google Stock Earnings Benefit From Failing Dollar
Google’s earnings report, released last week, showed it beat Wall Street’s expectations by $101 million, sending the stock way up. However, Valleywag explains that, due to the sinking dollar, Google’s earnings were $202 million higher than they would have been if the dollar were stronger, meaning the surprise extra growth didn’t exist almost at all.
Google News Shows Quotes Google News has a new feature that lets you search for people who are quoted in news articles. Just throw a name into Google News and you’ll see a quote from them at the top. Click their name, and you’ll see a page full of quotes in various news stories they’re in.
Google-Monopoly (The Game)
Box HQ has put together a version of the popular Monopoly board game that replaces everything in the game with Google-related items. For example, the properties are all web companies (Microsoft and Yahoo replace Boardwalk and Park Place) and jail is the Deadpool. You can just print out the PDF and get started, or go all out and modify a Monopoly game board to turn it into Google-opoly. One problem: there aren’t enough I’m Feeling Lucky and Google.org cards.
Google Finds New CIO Google has named a new Chief Information Officer, with Benjamin Fried from Morgan Stanley’s Application Infrastructure group taking over next month. Fried worked on Google’s IPO four years ago, giving him some experience with the company. Fried takes over for Douglas Merrill, who left for EMI earlier this month.
If you haven’t used Google Website Optimizer yet, perhaps the benefits of A/B Split & Multivariable Testing and Intuitive Reports will woo you. The goals, of course, are to increase sales, improve landing pages, get more leads, determine cost per acquisition (CPA), increase time spent on site, estimate guesswork from your site design, and more.
Lots of Google Doodles
Zorgloob’s got lots of Google Doodles you may not have noticed over the weeks.
AdWords API Price Dropped Google has droppped the prices on using the AdWords API. Search Engine Roundtable has the chart of revised prices, with the cost per API unit dropping as much as 70% on some services.
AdSense Ad Review Center Available To All Google has released its Ad Review Center for Google AdSense to all publishers. The Ad Review center allows AdSense publishers to control site targeted advertising on their website, including banning and approving targeted ads.
Download YouTube Videos As MP4 Ionut shares the URL parameter that will let you download videos from YouTube as MP4 files, perfect for loading onto a portable media player. Just use a URL like this one, except change the letters “ID” with the video ID code:
A Funny Google Interview Story Read this story about one guy’s experience interviewing for a job at Google. I guarantee you won’t see where it’s going.
(via Digg)
Arrest Caught On Google Maps Street View
One unfortunate fella was being arrested by authorities, and what happened to pass by? The Google Maps Street View van, that’s who! As a result, he wound up with that moment in his life, one he’d probably like to regret, recorded into Google Maps and now pictured on a number of blogs. Whoops.
Google Letting Apps Run On Their Cloud Google has announced a new service, Google App Engine, which lets web developers build their internet applications on top of Google’s technology. Developers will be able to use the Google File System and the Bigtable distributed data storage system in their applications, resulting in a strong backbone to compete with Amazon’s S3 service.
It’s free during the preview period, but the number of accepted applications and available resources are limited in the beginning. Let’s hope Google doesn’t leave it in a beta limbo for four years and make things impossible for some budding Web 2.0 companies.
Ex-Googler Bret Taylor has a very interesting article about opening up data sources so application developers can better take advantage of them, and so they can be free for innovation. Google could make App Engine a no-brainer for app developers if it has access to data source normal Web 2.0 companies normally go through hell to get access to.
Google Selling DoubleClick Performics Google has made a very popular decision, announcing it will be selling off the SEO business of Performics, a business of DoubleClick it received in the recently completed acquisition. Performics handled SEO and affiliate management for its clients, and a search engine doing SEO would have created a giant conflict of interest. The reaction has been almost nothing but positive, as many are glad to see Google eliminated this before it becomes a problem. However, Performics affiliate business will remain at Google, possibly creating a new area of the market for Google to dominate.
Googlers Leave For Facebook (and other places)
Some Googlers are jumping ship, heading for seemingly greener pastures (with stock options that aren’t already underwater), like Facebook. About 40 Facebookers, or 10% of Facebook’s entire workforce, used to be Googlers, showing that a definite shift is underway. Google’s director of social media, Ethan Beard left the company become Facebook’s new director of Business Development. Facebook’s new chief chef is Josef Desimone, formerly one of Google’s makers of free food, but Valleywag’s hearing that he won’t be missed.
A much bigger move than a chef changing jobs is that of Douglass Merrill, Google Chief Information Officer. He’s leaving for music giant EMI, becoming their new president. Now, leaving from a major exec position at a top Silicon Vallley company to become president of a big music company is almost certainly a step up, but given the music industry’s woes, you’d think Google could have had more to offer him than a top company in a failing industry could.
New Version of Google Talk in Testing
Google has finally remembered it has an IM client, releasing a Labs test of a new version of Google Talk. The first version of Google Talk was released over 2 and a half years ago, but Google has barely updated it at all in the meantime. The new version, dissapointingly, drops the calling feature, implying that Google has abandoned the original intent of the “Talk” name, but it does add tabbed browsing. I still use Talk every day, but I have no faith at this point in Google actually maintaining the software like it should.
Google Finance Adds Stock Screener
Google Finance now has something called a stock screener, essentially a type of sort/search site for the stock market, letting you narrow down through criteria to find stocks with specific attributes. For example, you can specify stocks within a range of market caps, dividend sizes, 52-week gains or losses, and others, and combine the criteria to discover the perfect stock. This being Google Finance, it’s all accomplished with fancy AJAX sliders.
I used it to discover that there is only one company on the market bigger than Google that also does not pay off a dividend: Berkshire Hathaway. Good company to be in, but Google hasn’t been as good at the market as Buffet in many months.
Google Starts DoubleClick Layoffs 300 people lost their jobs today, as Google laid off 300 employees, or about 25%, of DoubleClick, the advertising firm it bought for $3.1 billion. The layoffs were expected and even warned about by Google, but it’s always sad to see people lose their job, especially in a recession. Hopefully recruiters are excited at the idea of hiring all these people, and they won’t spend too much time on unemployment.
If you can hire a DoubleClicker, or are a DoubleClicker looking for a new job, send me a message. I’ll try to connect the two sides.
Valleywag has been covering the layoffs heavily, saying that:
YouTube Starts Tagging Copyrighted Videos YouTube has started identifying music videos by the artists in them, tagging the video with “Contains Content From” and a link to the artist’s YouTube account. Artists in the program get to choose to put advertising on the video’s page and earn money from it, or they can block the videos from being viewed. Alternatively, they can elect to just receive tracking stats on their videos and see how popular they are, or link to where the music can be bought on AmazonMP3.
Google Grants Gave Out $273 Million In Free Ads Google’s blog noted the five year anniversary of Google Grants, which gives free AdWords advertising to non-profits. They said that in the history of the program, 4,000 grantees have received a stunning $273.3 million in free ads, all out of the kindness of Google’s heart*. 1,000 Googlers have volunteered their time and effort to keep the program running and help it roll out in new countries (fifteen so far).
* - okay, and a tiny bit because, in an auction pricing system, unfilled inventory actually lowers earnings on paid inventory
AdSense Ads All Scrolling Now?
Google ran a test of a modification to AdSense ads last December that added scroll up/down buttons to ad units, letting users click to switch in a new set of text ads. Looks like they really liked the performance of the ads, since many people are reporting spotting the scrolling buttons on all ad units. I can confirm seeing them on all my ad units, so it could very well be the new default.
Entire Internet Goes Crazy Over April Fools
As usual, April Fools day was the internet’s Christmas, with many major and minor websites getting in the holiday spirit, most with unfunny fake news stories. A few were interest or stood out:
YouTube turned all the Featured Videos on its front page into links to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. The video, already the center of the Rickrolling meme, is now the unofficial anthem of April Fools day, with multiple pranks involving it somehow. The video pulled 6 million views in just one day.
Phillip listed a ton of others from Google, including a retread “We’re going to space” joke from Google (this time with Richard Branson and Mars and YouTube videos, but even less funny than when they did it in 2006), scratch-and-sniff Google Book Search, Google Talk auto converting everything you say into acronyms, a paper airplane template in Google Docs, custom email time in Gmail, Google Calendar’s Wake Up Kit (which pours a bucket of water on you if you ignore the alarm) and I’m Feeling Lucky button (random blind dates), Orkut renamed Yogurt, and more.
Blogger launched “Google Weblogs”, essentially a look at what a blog service by Google would have looked like in 2002, before Google discovered UI design
Andy talked about a Google USB Search Watch. Yes, a watch, as in what you wear on your wrist.
Google Docs Finally Gets Gears Offline Access
Google Docs, the most obvious candidate for offline access, has finally been enabled to work with Google Gears. You can now access and edit your text documents (but not spreadsheets or presentations, yet) without an internet connection, provided you’ve installed the Google Gears plugin. Wonderful news, and hopefully the start of a wave of Google products taking advantage of Google’s offline platform.
Here’s a video about it:
Google Spreadsheets Adds Gadgets Google Spreadsheets has added a directory of Google Gadgets you can use to extend its functionality. It includes charts, new table functionality, pivot tables, maps, search results, organization charts, and many other features Spreadsheets lacks. It also now has email notifications, autocomplete and a new visualization API. Unlike Docs, Spreadsheets is one area where the majority of users won’t be satisfied with an underpowered Microsoft Word, and any way Google can get advanced features in there, the better.
Google’s Search Lead Continues To Grow comScore saw Google share of the search market grow in February (surprising no one), reaching 59%. Yahoo fell to 21.6%, Microsoft slipped slightly to 9.6%, and Ask added .1% to reach 4.6%.
Viacom Will Not Get Punitive Damages Vs. YouTube A judge ruled that if Viacom prevails in its lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube over copyrighted videos, it would not be entitled to punitive damages. Instead, Viacom will have to prove actual damages, with each successfully proven “willfull” violation costing Google up to $300,000, and other costing as little as $750. Gonna have a hard time getting $1 billion out of Google that way.
Ionut notes that Google is already running April Fools “jokes” around the world. In Japan, there’s something about a joke regarding words that are similarly pronounced. In China, the company blog says they’re launching a human-powered search engine (watch out, Mahalo). In Australia, they’re letting you search the future. And in the United States, they’re possibly firing hundreds of hard-working advertising people — wait, that’s not funny!
But seriously, on the one hand, I’m hoping Google’s April Fools joke is good, on the other I’d rather see all those DoubleClickers keep their job. The “other hand” is weighing a lot more on my conscience than the humor hand, but I suspect that among those writing the pink slips, Google “hilarious” joke will be the only thing they really care about tomorrow.
Google Earth Getting Street View? Webware reports that they’re hearing Google will add Street View, its popular novelty feature in Google Maps that lets you see street-level photographs of businesses, making it available in the Google Earth desktop software. Their source is very non-specific, but the rumor does sound very believable, since there’s no good reason for Google Earth users to lag behind Maps users for this long. Webware says the addition could come in the next few weeks.
Barack Obama Rendered in Google SketchUp
Someone used SketchUp, Google’s 3D modeling software, to create this model of Barack Obama’s head. The whole thing is 400 polygons of rendered facial features, and I gotta say, it creeps me out. At least Obama’s a decent looking guy; I can’t imagine how creepy a 3D rendering of Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton (with giant eyes!) would look.
Sync Google Talk With Twitter Timothy Broder wrote a script that takes your latest Twitter message and makes it your Google Talk/Gmail Chat status message. It’s a simple thing, perfectly useful and good, just like a baby angel.
Crack Deal in Google Maps?
Is this really what this Digger thinks it is? Well, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to conduct a business transaction through your car window with a guy standing in the street. I think.
Does Google Chief’s $1 Salary Mean Anything?
For another year, Google’s head honchos will be taking a $1 salary, supposedly putting the interests of the business ahead of money. It’s a simple token gesture, offset by the fact that the guys taking the pledge, founders Page and Brin and CEO Schmidt, are billionaires, though it, in theory, would make them more focused on the health of the stock price. All three lost billions of dollars in the last few months as the once high flying stock tanked, though you won’t see them sweating it.
The salary/publicity stunt has been criticized as meaningless, and Valleywag has pointed out it means the super-rich taking the salary are contributing six cents to help Social Security and one penny for Medicare, meaning that none of their mega-riches are going to help those served by important government programs.
Google To Layoff DoubleClickers Tuesday Valleywag reports that Google intends to hold its first round of layoffs of DoubleClick employees, trimming headcount at its acquisition to get the most value out of the buy. The layoffs should start this Tuesday, the first day of the second financial quarter of the year.
Of course, that day is also April 1, the day Google usually publishes a funny prank to amuse web surfers. If Google tries to be funny while firing hundreds, if not thousands of good people, laying them off in the middle of a recession when the job market isn’t going anywhere, I don’t think I’ll be laughing a whole lot.
Barry Diller Wins IAC Trial
In the case for control of IAC and the right to decide the company’s future, Barry Diller has defeated John Malone and won the right to break up the company into five seperate firms. Considering the hard work Diller has put into screwing up Ask.com the last few months, his victory is everyone else’s loss.
Google Israel Goes Black for Earth Hour
Google’s website in Israel turned its background black Thursday, marking off Earth Hour, some sort of awareness campaign where people turn off their lights for an hour to save the planet. While the message was nice, it was still strange to see Google ignoring its own research that clearly showed a black Google wastes more energy than a lit Google.
YouTube Showing Advanced Video Stats YouTube has launched a new feature, called Insight, which shows you more advanced stats for your own uploaded videos. It features a Google Finance-type graph that shows viewing over time, so you can see which days viewing spiked, that sort of thing. Click About This Video on your videos page, or add “http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_insight?v=” before any video ID (it won’t work if it isn’t your video).
Video Ads Make it Into Google Search Google has started showing video ads in its search results, adding a “watch commercial” or “watch demonstration” or “watch testimonial” link beneath AdWords ads. Click the link, and a video expands and plays right there in the sidebar. The video is tiny (160×140) and is about 30 seconds long, and the advertiser pays if the user watches the video, not if they click the link to go to the ad’s landing page. I saw one of the ads in action, and if they don’t cost too much more than regular ads, they seem like a good deal.
Google Documents Revamps Interface
Google Docs’ word processor application has changed its interface, adding drop-down menus and getting rid of the old tabbed toolbar interface. The old interface was a poorly implemented middle ground between the old interface paradigm common in document apps like the older versions of Microsoft Office, and the new Ribbon used in Office 2007, and Google finally wised up and junked the confusing system.
The new interface is pretty familiar to anyone who has been using Microsoft Word since the Windows 3.1 days, with drop down menus and a simple toolbar. The new menus do include a list of the keyboard shortcuts, making it easier to use those timesavers, but the changes don’t bring anything new to the table. Guess this is one area where Microsoft can claim to be bolder and more innovative.
Blogoscoped also found this, an Easter Egg (or possible prep for April Fools Day), making fun of the old Microsoft Office feature, Clippy. It’s funny, but Clippy is a remnant of Office’s past, and Docs is looking more and more like Office used to, so maybe the joke’s on Google.
Google Japan Parametron Doodle Google ran this Doodle logo in Japan last week, honoring the anniversary of some Japanese computer:
YouTube Releases API for Customizing Player YouTube released an API for customizing its embeddable player, letting you change the look of it to match the look of your website. You can write completely customizable video player, changing any element and putting together anything your mind/code can come up with.
Googler is Convicted Hacker Valleywag has an article about Christophe Bisciglia, a senior software engineer at Google who is also a convicted former hacker. Bisciglia got in a dispute with his boss about a decade ago at the age of 17, and decided to take revenge by flooding the system with emails, sending email to the company’s customers, and defacing their website. Obviously he’s matured since then, but lets hope the next time he loses his temper the results don’t show in your Gmail account.
Spring Google Doodle
Google ran this Doodle logo to mark the beginning of Spring:
Google Loses FCC Auction The final results in the FCC’s spectrum auction are in, and the winners of major blocks of the 700 MHz spectrum are Verizon, winner of most of the coveted and somewhat open C block with Vodaphone (along with parts of A and B block), and AT&T, winner of most of B block. In total, the auction raised over $19 billion, much more than was expected, none of it from Google.
Hulu Launches
NBC and News Corp finally launchedHulu.com, its YouTube competitor video site, to the general public last week. Early reports are that, despite a lot of criticism from the press a year ago, the site has developed into a strong, high quality platform with a decent amount of good content. Hulu has a bunch of TV shows and full-length movies, and doesn’t charge anything to show them, just inserting ads. As long as the content is there, there’s absolutely no reason Hulu won’t be a hit.
Google Completes Purchase of DoubleClick
With the European regulators finally signing off on the deal, Google completed its megabillion dollar deal to buy DoubleClick. The acquisition met with a lot of opposition from Google’s competitors, who complained that it would create a monopoly in online advertising, but both U.S. and EU officials determined that DoubleClick’s business was sufficiently different enough from Google’s core search ad business, plus a possible Yahoo/Microsoft combo would be competitive enough.
The final acquisition cost was $3.24 billion, according to Google, about $140 million than originally planned. That’s either due to inflation, unexpected costs, slight changes in the deal, or includes the cost of getting the acquisition improved in the first place. SEJournal has the text of an email Google sent to all of DoubleClick’s clients with some FAQs.
Yahoo Buzz Driving Massive Traffic
I completely recant my earlier criticism of Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo’s Digg competitor. The main difference between Buzz and Digg is that it only allows in publishers who use a Yahoo advertising program, and the top stories from Buzz make their way onto the Yahoo homepage, the most popular webpage on the planet. Publishers in the program are reporting all-time traffic records, even really popular sites like Salon and TechCrunch, making Buzz a huge incentive for publishers to use Yahoo for their ads. Yahoo should have thought of this years ago.
YouTube Integrated Into Spore
The much anticipated Spore, arriving later this year from Maxis and gaming legend Will Wright this September, will include integration with Google’s YouTube. Players will be able to upload videos of their Spore creatures to YouTube while playing the game, and an official Spore channel on YouTube will feature the best contributions from the community. I got to sit down with an EA rep at a recent games preview event, and I was shocked at how well-thought out and integral the community aspect was for Spore, and the YouTube integration represents yet another great addition.
AOL Buys Bebo AOL bought Bebo, a mega popular (in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand) social networking site for $850 million. While the acquisition price has been widely panned as too expensive, it does underscore the importance of social sites being popular in countries other than the United States, and how MySpace and Facebook are not the only real players.
comScore is reporting that Google’s ad quality initiatives are the reason the company’s paid clicks rate is dropping. TechCrunch notes that Google’s decision last November to stop using the white space in its text ads as clickable area has resulted in a serious drop in paid clicks as well, especially for AdSense publishers.
In both cases, Google is reducing the number of ads that get run and the number that get clicked, all in the interest of sending more quality clicks advertiser’s way. Google’s theory has always been that the higher the quality of clicks, the more money the advertiser has to spend on even more clicks, so if every click is more valuable than the competition’s, Google’s advertisers will be encouraged to spend even more money than they normally would.
In a growing marketplace with a ton of unused inventory, that theory could work, but Google isn’t growing like it used to, and there aren’t a lot of places for advertisers to got that aren’t already being tried. At some point, you can only improve ad quality so much that you are eventually just removing ads, and leaving no place in the network to replace them.
Did Google tip past that point where ad quality can hurt the company as much as help it? That statistics seem to say so.
Amit reports that Google has updated the Terms and Conditions for AdSense, removing some restrictions. The changes:
AdSense and Referral buttons can now be displayed on registration pages, whereas before they were prohibited from any registration or thank you page, or on chat pages and in emails.
AdSense for Search boxes may be placed on pages without content
AdSense ads from multiple accounts may be placed on the same page
AdSense Referral products may be placed on pages without content
Ads from other contextual ad networks may be placed on the same page as AdSense, as well as other site search programs
If you stop using your AdSense account for a considerable amount of time, Google is allowed to donate your earnings to charity
AdSense publishers are recommended to add a privacy policy explaining possible concerns regarding cookies and other things
Seeking Alpha reports that Fox Interactive and Google are looking beyond their current advertising deal, with Google saying they regret making the agreement and Fox looking to Microsoft as their next partner. It is unknown what sort of termination payouts will be required to end the deal, but if Google wants desperately out of the sinkhole $900 million MySpace deal it made less than a year and a half ago, it’ll probably cost a pretty penny.
Then winner in all this should be Microsoft. If they can swing the MySpace deal, then make money where Google couldn’t, they’ll prove that their assertion that Google is a search ad company that doesn’t do brand and display advertising right will be seriously bolstered. Microsoft can do more than make money from this move, they can get the rest of the market to take them more seriously.
Google has announced AdSense for Video, a video ad program for decent sized video publishers, letting them place overlay ads on their videos on their own websites and make some cash. You’ll need at least 1 million video views per month and semi-pro video production skills. The ads will come in two types
Graphical overlays, the same kind of ads which briefly appear below YouTube videos, and earn money on an impressions-based basis
Text overlay ads, which are similar, and appear as semi-transparent layers or logos, and earn on a pay-per-click basis
Here’s a video Google released about the new program:
While Google’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick looks a little smaller next to Microsoft’s holycrap offer for Yahoo, it is still a major change in the online advertising market, and it is still in the process of being approved. Hopefully, the deal could get final approval from the European Commission this month, according to a research report released yesterday. Google announced the deal ten months ago, the U.S. approved it six weeks ago, and if Europe finally budges, we can all move on with our lives.
Google’s print advertising program, which places ads from AdWords advertisers in magazines and newspapers, has started using two-dimensional bar codes in their ads. The bar code images, called QR Codes, are common in Japan and use a pattern of black and white squares. Properly equipped mobile devices with phone cameras can read the code, which can contain all sorts of information, including the name of the business, contact info, a URL, anything the advertiser wants to put in there.
May companies are trying to bring 2D bar codes to the U.S., mostly unsuccessfully. The software ships with many phones and is available to be installed on almost all others, but it has yet to catch on. There are many competing formats, and several of my family friends are investors in a competing format. While Google’s support behind QR Code could, in theory, bolster the format, consumers would have to start recognizing it and caring about it before this format war ended.
Allen Stern has a number of videos from Google’s Advertising Club Meetup at Google New York earlier this week. One of them, embedded below, has Google’s Tiffany Shen Miller talking about Print Ads and the bar codes. The rest of the videos can be watched at Allen’s blog.
Incredimail, an Israel-based “fun email” company that is publicly traded on the NASDAQ, has a business model consisting entirely of revenue from Google AdSense. The company discovered the danger of that single stream earlier this month when their AdSense account was disabled, but the rest of the world got to see that common problem unfold in a unique way: They stock tanked.
Incredimail’s stock, traded as MAIL, fell 30% in a single day on news that the company had lost its means of making money. In the interim, the company probably could have found another partner, like using Yahoo’s Publisher Network as a backup, but instead they watched as the market lost confidence in their company. It took 11 days to reach an agreement with Google to resolve matters, and since then the stock is up, but still off 21.92% from its price three weeks ago.
There is a lot of danger in solely relying on AdSense. I use AdSense, but I also have Blogads bringing in a little extra, as well as an Adify spot that is funded by ComputerWorld and significant Amazon referral revenue, and it’s still not enough to cover our expenses. For the last two months, we’ve been trying to solicit ads from tech companies and startups, but without any sales experience, it hasn’t been all that successful. I need to figure out how Andy Beal does it.
If you are relying on AdSense, and only AdSense, as your primary source of income, for god’s sake, just diversify. Try other, complementary ad networks, try finding something in your niche, try selling ads yourself or finding someone to sell ads for you. At the very least, sign up for an account with another contextual ad network, like Yahoo’s, so if something goes wrong with AdSense you can rotate in the new code.
Google has made two changes to its AdSense referrals program, removing whole countries of publishers for the program, as well as rolling back and cancelling most of the payments publishers have come to rely on. The two changes:
The payment system, which had been expanded to make it more complicated and more lucrative, has been rolled back to the way it used to be. Google is now using the old system, paying out $100 if you refer a new AdSense publisher who earns $100 in the first 180 days. Under the improved system, you not only could earn that, but $5 if the referred publisher earns $5, as well as a monster $2,000 payment if you refer 25 people who earn $100 each. Those payments are now completely gone.
Most of the countries in the world have now been removed from the AdSense referral program. Everyone is kicked out, save those in North America, Latin America, and Japan.
If you really think about it, you’ll see why publishers like Darren Rowse are furious. Darren lives in Australia, but most of his audience is American, making that second change incredibly stupid. A referral is a referral. Google makes money off of it no matter where it comes from. The only reason to change this is because Google must have see that the program wasn’t earning as well as it could, and concluded that it was failing because it was too complicated and needed to be simplified.
I’ve got news: From experience, when you try to improve something by removing options and making it simpler, you very rarely wind up with something better. The new payment structure removes all incentive for referring small publishers ($5) as well as the added incentive for referring lots of publishers ($2,000). It makes the program almost worthless, earning only the occasional $100.
If Google thought the program wasn’t converting well before, wait till they see how bad it is now. They’ve cancelled out most of the planet from being eligible, and removed incentive for succeeding at it. AdSense referrals will perform even worse now, as the few publishers who had been using and had been referring Google new customers give up, knowing there are better ways to make money than this crock.
While the rest of us were stuck with a cheap 1-gig USB card, Google’s top AdWords advertisers and search engine marketing agencies received the Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder, a pocket video camcorder with 1-gigabyte of internal storage and a 1.5-inch LCD screen. The camera costs $115 at Amazon, so it’s a pretty sweet gift, showing how much Google appreciates their business.
One wonders why everyone else got the USB drive, a huge step down from last year’s photo frame. These days, USB drives are about as ubiquitous and special as floppy disks were ten years ago. I’d rather have gotten a tiny stuffed Google bear, or something cute, than a USB card that doesn’t measure up to other USB drives most people already have lying around.
(via Kevin Heisler)
Google’s $3.1 billion mega-acquisition of ad serving company DoubleClick has passed Federal Trade Commission approval over the objections of everyone who doesn’t want Google to be successful. Despite Microsoft and other companies crying “antitrust!” and “monopoly!”, The FTC approved the deal with no conditions attached. The FTC determined that Google and DoubleClick are not competitors but rather companies that do business in different areas of the same industry.
The FTC also made an important distinction, reaffirming that privacy laws must be handled on an industry-wide basis, not be created for a single company. In other words, hopefully in the future, if there are concerns about privacy, a company like Google will not be singled out, but rather the entire industry will have to face the same regulations.
Valleywag notes that of the five commissioners who voted on the case, three of those who voted in favor of Google attended a Progress and Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit, funded partially by Google, over the past two years. Not to say that there’s major conflict, but rather that Google is really learning how to play the game. Still, besides those three commissioners, the vote was just one for, one against.
So, now that the FTC has approved it, all that’s left is for the European regulators to give the okay. Assuming they don’t horribly drag their feet, maybe this thing will even be done before the one year anniversary of announcing the deal. Then, Google just has to go through the long process of integrating DoubleClick into Google. Boy, this is just a thrill-a-minute, ain’t it?
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Matt Cutts has a useful clarification on his blog regarding all the talk of Google consolidating subdomains in search results. Turns out things are not nearly as bad as previously assumed; rather than consolidating all subdomains into single groups, Google’s algorithm has just gotten smarter and can now tell between subdomains used for seperate sites and those used for navigational purposes.
What does this mean? It means that, if the algo works as intended, a price comparison site that changed the subdomain for every category o product would probably be subject to “host crowding”, with all the subdomains considered one single site, while a blog site (like this one) that uses subdomains to denote almost completely seperate blogs would continue to be treated like seperate sites.
Matt also clarifies that this change has been live for a while now. So, if your site isn’t already subject to host crowding, it probably won’t be. Check it out. If you are worried, do a better job differentiating between your subdomains, like changin the titles and other template-wide details.
Google’s print advertising program, which places ads from AdWords advertisers in magazines and newspapers, 
