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 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.
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
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:
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.
Google AdSense is running a test of a new ad feature that includes up and down buttons in the corner of ad units. Click the button, and more ads slide in. This way, if you love (love!) ads, but you just want more ads, you can order up a new side helping of ads. You know, because you can never have too many.
Here’s a screenshot of the implementation by Barry:
Google is ending the Onsite Advertiser Sign-up option for AdSense. They are removing the “Advertise On This Site” link from AdSense ads, as well as shutting down all those customized landing pages many publishers set up to invite potential advertisers to target their website. Site Targeting for AdWords isn’t going away, but Google saw that inviting advertisers to use it on every single page wasn’t converting well, plus the added text probably did more to hurt click-through rates than anything else.
Here’s the email I got from Google about it:
Hello,
We want to share an important update with you about the Onsite
Advertiser Sign-up feature. You may recognize this feature as a
link on certain ad units that reads, “Advertise on this site”, or
you may have included direct links to the Onsite Advertiser
Sign-up landing page on your site. Unfortunately, this feature has
not been performing as well as we had hoped, and in the coming
weeks the feature will be retired.
As the AdSense product evolves, we occasionally re-evaluate
aspects of the product to make sure they are performing well for
our publishers and meeting our goals. We found that the Onsite
Advertiser Sign-up feature was under-performing, and so we have
made the decision to focus our efforts on features that we believe
will drive the best results for publishers.
The Onsite Advertiser Sign-up link will no longer appear on any of
our ad units. If you included direct links on your site to the
customizable Onsite Advertiser Sign-up page, these links will soon
redirect to the main AdWords sign-up page.
Thank you again for your support of the Onsite Advertiser Sign-up
feature in the past, and we apologize for any inconvenience this
news may cause.
Google is in middle of sending out their holiday gifts to AdWords advertisers and AdSense publishers, a great tradition by the company. This year’s gift is dissapointing a few, a strange card that apparently flips out a USB connecter so you can use its 2 gigabytes of storage space. Besides the relatively small storage space (I’ve gotten 6 gig mini hard drives at press events), the large size of it makes it inconvenient, except for keeping in a wallet.
Still, a free gift is a free gift, which is nice, but an SD card of the same size would have been more useful.
Google changed the clickable area on AdSense ads last month, requiring users to click the title or URL, and not making the white space a trap for accidental clicks. It’s a move that scares the hell out of many publishers, but may very well improve earnings in the long run as it improves click quality. Still, some have noticed that Premium AdSense publishers, plus Google’s own Gmail, still have the white space active for clicks.
I looked into it, and this is most incidental, not an intentional oversight by Google. Even though the change to white space rules is only three weeks old, Google did make sure to change the guidelines for Premium publishers, instructing them to apply the same title and link rules to their ads. If you remember where the guidelines are, you can check it yourself, and you’ll see the new instructions:
Clickable area – only the headline and the display URL should be clickable and should go directly to the URL. When a customer mouses over the listing, the URL shown should be the display URL rather than the actual URL.
The old guidelines told publishers to use all the available white space for clicks. Premium ads are specifically coded by the publisher, and the publishers had to implement the white space, not Google. Even though Google changed the rules, the old code is exactly the same, and that means it contains the same white space rules. New ads will be coded according to the new rules, but Google hasn’t told the Premium to go back and re-code anything, and it shouldn’t expect them to, either.
As for Gmail, that’s Google’s oversight, and I’m sure they’ll correct it. After all, they wouldn’t want an unfair advantage, right?
FeedBurner added a little bit of integration with Google AdSense (makes sense, considering Google bought them months ago). You can now link your AdSense and FeedBurner account, and put together AdSense ad units to use on your website (though still not in your RSS feeds), with FeedBurner having all the AdSense ad units, custom channel and color schemes you like to use. Read more about it at Problogger.
Google has released to the world (well, to AdSense publishers) the option to embed YouTube players with ads and make money off them. You can’t just embed any video you like, so I can’t embed my occasional “Best of YouTube” posts and make money specifically from the video player, but instead you choose from a number of YouTube’s content partners like lonelygirl15, EmergencyCheese, Ford Models, LockerGnome (Chris Pirillo), smosh and many others, or you can enter a list of keywords for Google to auto-choose videos for you from.
The video embedded above is a sample video from Google explaining how the program works. The player below is targetted to the keyword “google”:
As you can see, a small banner ad appears in a space on top of the player, and while you watch videos, an ad overlay appears at the bottom that can be closed. The playlist appears as the flowing overlay at the bottom, as it does in many YouTube videos.
Obviously, not getting to choose the videos in the player severely limits the usage of the player. It can be placed on keyword specific pages, and little else. If there’s a Chris Pirillo video I really like, even though he’s a YouTube partner, I can’t share that video as an ad unit, because I can only broadly select his channel, not any specific videos.
Also, the argument for YouTube only advertising with partners only works with ads on YouTube.com, that users who upload video should get to decide if video appears beneath their content, and YouTube should decide which videos are worthy of advertising. If I want to put ads around my own videos on my own external site, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to, especially since this program links my YouTube account to my AdSense account.
Also, the ad unit uses a Script tag, another mistake. Google continues to limit certain uses of their ads by wrapping them in JavaScript, preventing those ads from appearing in places that ban JavaScript, like WordPress blogs. I had to install a plugin just to show you those videos in this post. YouTube became successful because it made embedding dead easy, and Google is removing that ease with this program.
Still, it’s good to see this getting started. Hopefully, Google will figure out that the appeal of this program in its current form is limited, and fix it soon.
The YouTube AdSense unit can be activated in your AdSense account, and is then available on YouTube itself at this link. It is currently only available to English-language publishers in the U.S..
Google made two ad-related releases yesterday. First, it formally released Google AdSense for Mobile, letting publishers add ads to their mobile sites. The ads run off the server, not on client-side JavaScript (since most mobile browsers have trouble with JavaScript), and you get two ad units to choose from (one with a single ad, one with two ads).
As several blogs have noted, a problem is that the ads can only be shown on mobile sites, but not regular sites. If you have a completely seperate website for mobile devices, you can run the ads there, but if you just change your CSS for mobiles, that makes implementing these a lot harder. Expect to see them in a lot of iPhone “apps”, but not a lot of blog templates.
The other release was that of Google Gadget ads, which are a new ad format AdWords advertisers can take advantage of. It’s a rich media ad, that can contain anything a Google Gadget can, and thus have some very advanced functionality. Not only will these be used as ads, but they can be added to users iGoogle personalized homepages, monetizing iGoogle and expanding the reach of the ads beyond a display ad to something you keep and use continuously.
There’s this nice plugin for Firefox and Google AdSense that gives you some graphs in your AdSense interface, letting you better visualize your earnings. GraphSense comes either as a plugin or a Greasemonkey script, bringing a line graph showing the number of clicks, a pie chart showing income per channel, and a bar graph showing the clickthrough rate per channel. Looks like a useful addition to your AdSense interface.
It’s a shame Google hasn’t seen fit to add some of the charting functionality from many of its other products to AdSense. It’s quite clear that several Google products share the same charting code, so you have to wonder what’s keeping the AdSense folks from implementing it.
Otherwise, since many Greasemonkey scripts work in Opera, anyone want to check if this one can work, and if so, help me figure out what I’m doing wrong?
(via 45n5 > Darren Rowse)
A commenter here had a story of how he noticed some strange activity on his AdSense account, and being a good citizen, he told Google that something odd was going on. What did Google do? They banned his AdSense account! Jeez. If the reality is as ridiculous as it sounds, Google should have been thanking him, not cutting him off.
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Google announced a deal to be the exclusive provider of auction-based text advertising on CNN.com. The agreement will last multiple years, though it’s not clear how many. Clint Boulton notes a few other recent web ad exclusives, including Google getting a multi-year for ads and search with Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive last month and Yahoo picking up Philly.com earlier this month.
