Now that Yahoo! has finally decided things are really over with Microsoft, the company has found room in its heart for a new love: Google. The two companies today announced an advertising partnership that will basically place Google AdSense advertisements alongside Yahoo! search results.
The deal isn't exactly comprehensive. It covers "some of" Yahoo!'s web properties, and the ads will only be displayed in the US and Canada. The agreement is non-exclusive, which means that Yahoo! may display its own ads or ads from other parties as well.
In a press release, Yahoo! says it expects to raise about $800 million in revenue per year from the deal. Google, in return, posted a blog entry saying the deal is "good for users, advertisers, and publishers." The US government isn't quite convinced yet. Back in April, the Justice Department responded to a test run of a Google/Yahoo! partnership with an investigation. And today the chairman of the US Senate Antitrust Subcommittee said the Senate will be closely examining the deal.
Weebly also recently rolled out tools for adding Google AdSense advertisements to a site. While you could always place ads on a page by copying and pasting snippets of HTML and JavaScript, now the process is even easier. All you need to do is drag and drop the Google AdSense box from the toolbar to a spot on your page. Then you can select from a list of ad unit sizes and shapes.
There is a small price to pay -- Weebly will take a hefty 50% cut of any money you earn from advertising on your Weebly site. Or you could, you know, just sign up for an AdSense account and copy and paste your code the old fashioned way.
It's been almost a year since Google acquired RSS service Feedburner or $100 million. But in that year, we've seen very little integration of Google services into Feedburner, or vice versa. Sure, it's now easier to redirect your Blogspot feed to Feedburner, but that's about it.
Now, according to the official Feedburner blog, the company is getting ready to roll out the thing we'd all kind of been expecting: Google AdSense integration. What that means is you're probably going to start seeing much more advertising in your RSS reader.
While there are already a few ways to place ads in an RSS feed, a huge number of blogs and web sites use Feedburner to polish and publish their feeds. Being able to place ads in their feeds with just a few clicks of a button almost certainly means that many of those content publishers will be flipping the switch as soon as they can. Up until now, most web publishers viewed RSS feeds as a loss leader. You give away some of your content, ad-free, in the hopes of gaining loyal readers who will tell their friends about the site. But if you can also get a few of them to click on ads even if they rarely visit your actual web page, why wouldn't you do it?
What do you think? Are you a web publisher looking forward to Google AdSense/Feedburner integration? Or are you a loyal blog reader preparing to unsubscribe to any feeds that start displaying ads?
It seems Yahoo! recently lost faith in its ability to advertise, and it almost seems desperate to try something very different. In fact, the company seems so desperate in a Web-world increasingly dominated by Google, that it's going to give AdSense a shot. Yes, Yahoo! will host Google ads on its own site.
Though the mini-partnership is cute and we're sure they'd make a fun but powerful couple, don't make any assumptions about their intentions yet. As much as Google would like to get in that pair of pants, Yahoo will only support AdSense in up to 3% of all search results for now. If AdSense does what it promises to do -- make more money than Yahoo's advertising services -- the two companies should enter into a more committed relationship.
It feels like Yahoo's just giving up, but you can't blame 'em. Google's an innovative monster, and how do you compete with that? I guess if you can't beat 'em, catch a ride on their coattails.
European regulators have approved Google's plan to buy online advertising giant DoubleClick. The acquisition, which has been in the works for the better part of a year will solidify Google's dominance in the advertising field. Right now Google makes most of its money through its lucrative contextual advertising system. The DoubleClick acquisition will help Google move into display ads, an area where the company is currently not as strong.
Google competitors including Microsoft, Yahoo! had filed anti-trust complaints, claiming that the deal would give Google an unfair advantage in the online advertising marketplace. But EU regulators basically gave Google a pass and said the deal could go forward as is. Of course, if Microsoft manages to buy Yahoo!, (a company that has been playing hard to get), that might give Microsoft the tools to level the playing field. You know, assuming EU or US regulators don't nix the deal.
It's time for YouTube to start earning its keep. Back when Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion a lot of us were wondering how Google planned to make money from the video sharing site. And for a year or so, the company has been talking about embedding ads in YouTube videos. A while back, Google even started offering an ugly ad unit that fits in the border of embedded YouTube videos (pictured right).
Now NewTeeVee reports that Google is preparing to launch an improved version of its video ad units. The new ads will be in-video ads, showing up as pop-up overlays over the top of your video. Publishers will be able to decide whether or not to display ads and where they should appear in a video. Advertisers will be able to publish either short text or video ads that will show up in a video.
Like Google's text and image-based ads, they'll be chosen based on the other content of the web site. But they'll also be paired with relevant videos, which is a bit trickier to accomplish since it's not easy for a computer to decide what a video is about. But then if you've ever noticed completely irrelevant ads popping up in your Gmail, you know that's nothing new.
Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!
This edition covers:
Google reworks Adsense, again... and again
Blogger users can use Blogger url as OpenID
Google still bidding for the 700 Mhz spectrum in FCC auction
Google reworks Adsense, again... and again Much commotion ensued after Google Adsense decided that publishers who send referrals from outside of North America, Latin America, or Japan would be retired. This in addition to announcing that several referral bonuses were to be discontinued made for quite a bit of a storm in the blogosphere. Google, hearing the outcry of the community, quickly made some amendments: as long as the referral is located within North America, Latin America, or Japan, it does not matter where the publisher is located. But still, no more bonuses.
We don't know about you, but we can't count the number of times that we've visited a web site, seen the limited number of ads in the sidebar and thought to ourselves, "wouldn't it be great if there were more links I could click on that would take me to pages where people want to take my money?"
OK, we might be kidding (or we might not, you be the judge). But Google is apparently testing out a way to let web publishers insert a larger number of ads in a small space. Here's how it works. Google adds little up and down arrows at the bottom of the new AdSense units. If you click on the down arrow, the ad will scroll and you'll see a whole new page of contextual links. Hit the up arrow to go back to the first page.
Now, the reason AdSense works so well for Google and web publishers is because people do click on ads sometimes. If you're visiting a web site about widgets and there's an ad for a widget generator, that link might be as relevant as anything else on the web page. But we're not sure we know too many people who will go out of their way to scroll through the ads to find more paid listings. That'd be sort of like flipping channels when a TV program resumes just so you can find more commercials.
If you have Google AdSense on your web site in the hopes of making a few bucks, odds are you spend way too much of your day obsessively reading your AdSense reports. But for a company that has a robust web analytics tool, Google's AdSense reports are a bit thin. You can find out how many people are clicking on ads and how much money you're making, but there's no graphs and no good way to view data that's more than a few months old.
Fortunately, there's a third party solution that gives you a much fuller picture of your AdSense Stats. CSV AdStats can download AdSense CSV files manually or automatically and loads them into a powerful analysis tool. Now you can get a solid picture of your earnings over time. CSV AdStats lets you separate out data from custom channels, or compare one channel with another. And best of all, unlike Google's web tools, CSV AdStats lets you view day by day data from the time you opened your AdSense account.
The program does have a few rough edges. It appears to have been designed in French, and even if you select English as your default language, some menu items will appear in French anyway. But CSV AdStats is still incredibly useful for a free download, so we'll let that slide.
RSS feed publisher FeedBurner has rolled out a new option for monetizing your website. You can use FeedBurner to add Google AdSense in between posts on any blog or website. What you can't do is the place Google AdSense advertisements in your site's feed.
It's a bit puzzling that the Google-owned RSS publishing company is launching a service that has nothing to do with RSS feeds. There are plenty of other ways to place AdSense ads in between posts on your blog.
FeedBurner makes the process pretty easy as long as you have "FeedFlare" on your website. All you have to do is login to your FeedBurner account, click the monetize tab, login to AdSense, and choose the type of ads you want to use. You can choose from 468 x 60 pixels or 300 x 250 pixels.
Google plans to update its AdSense management console for web publishers. Right now if you want to tweak the color scheme, round off the edges, or make other changes to Google AdSense advertisements, you need to generate new code. If you have ads scattered across dozens of websites, that can be a bit of a hassle.
Under the new system, you'll be able manage all of your AdSense settings on Google's website. You can change colors, put ad units into difference channels, and make other changes. Those changes will all be reflected on your website.
It's not clear if this will work with existing ads on your site or if you'll have to generate new code for one more set of advertisements. Google plans to roll out the new feature within the next few weeks. If you've got an AdSense account, keep an eye out for a new "Manage Ads" option under the "AdSense Setup" tab.
It's been almost a year since Google acquired RSS service Feedburner or $100 million. But in that year, we've seen very little integration of Google services into Feedburner, or vice versa. Sure, it's now easier to redirect your Blogspot feed to Feedburner, but that's about it.
European regulators have approved Google's plan to buy online advertising giant DoubleClick. The acquisition, which has been in the works for the better part of a year will solidify Google's dominance in the advertising field. Right now Google makes most of its money through its lucrative contextual advertising system. The DoubleClick acquisition will help Google move into display ads, an area where the company is currently not as strong.
It's time for YouTube to start earning its keep. Back when Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion a lot of us were wondering how Google planned to make money from the video sharing site. And for a year or so, the company has been talking about embedding ads in YouTube videos. A while back, Google even started offering an ugly ad unit that fits in the border of embedded YouTube videos (pictured right). 
