Googlified

Yahoo! today announced that they will be showing Google’s AdSense for Search on their search engine for “up to two weeks and will be limited to no more than 3% of Yahoo! search queries” originated from the U.S. As described in the press release, Yahoo’s doing this to find “alternatives to maximize stockholder value”, but states that they are not joining the AdSense for Search program or “any further commercial relationship with Google”.

My theories are:

• Panama failed to delivered what it promised - this is obvious
• Google and Yahoo! are now BFF
• Yahoo! just want to slap Microsoft in the face

Well, they probably will join AdSense for Search after all, and history agrees: Yahoo! selected Google in 2000 as their default search engine after a beta trial.

[thank you Christian :D]

Every year this time, Google sends gifts to some of its selected AdSense and AdWords users. Last year they sent digital photo frames and iPod shuffles, and the gift this year is a 2GB USB memory card, inside a “pretty envelop”.

The memory card is so small that blogger Amit Agarwal already lost it (read: stolen). Perhaps next year they will send something bigger, like phones loaded with Android?

[photo by Barry Schwartz]

Google decided to change the clickable area of the AdSense ads from the full ad box to just the title and the URL of the ad to “reduce accidental clicks and increase value for advertisers.” The above image from Google Blogoscoped shows the clickable area before and after this change.

A lot of my friends don’t even know/recognize those are ads (potentially scams), especially the ad placements on parking domains. “Dude, come check this out - this website says that I can get a free iPhone. I am so getting it.” :)

[via Google Blogoscoped]

AdSense users can now monetize their sites by embedding YouTube videos, ProBlogger reports. This page on YouTube describes the “YouTube Video Units“:

• Relevant, Premium Content
  Deliver high quality video content to your site. Choose categories or have Google target your site content, and decide which categories you want to exclude.
• Targeted, Non-Intrusive Ads
  Earn revenue from ads targeted to your site content and to the videos being played. Ads appear as part of the YouTube player and outside of the video content to ensure a smooth user experience.
• Enhanced User Experience
  Bring users to your site more often and keep them there longer with highly revelant, frequently refreshed video from popular content providers.
• Customizable Player
  Customize the color theme and layout of the player to best fit your site.

The ads are placed on top of what looks like a customized YouTube player. I suppose that only the videos from YouTube partners are included in this program.

They better not include any animation.

Google today officially announced Gadget Ads, “customized [interactive, engaging, and appealing] ‘mini-sites’ that run as ads on AdSense publisher websites, [which] simultaneously providing value to advertisers while getting visitors to stick around your site.”

Currently, it’s available to a limited number of AdWords advertisers, but it will soon expand to other users. If you are part of it, you should have received an invitation and you can start making your own gadget ads. You can find the “How to Build Google Gadget Ads” document here and an “fully-equipped” online gadget editor that “lets you quickly build, test, and validate your gadget ads” here.

Well, they are still ads, aren’t they?

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger reports that some AdSense publishers are invited to join a secret group that’s “made up of some of its most successful publishers.”

Here’s part of the email, (from ProBlogger)

Hello xxxxxxxxxx,

Congratulations on your success with the AdSense program. Given your extensive experience with AdSense, I’m happy to invite you to join AdSense’s Online Advisory Council, a select group of publishers who offer input on new AdSense products and features. Our development team relies on the Online Advisory Council to help us refine our new services and features.

[…]

If you’d like to participate please reply to this email with the following text:

“I agree. I understand that information provided to me as part of the Online Advisory Council is Google Confidential Information under the applicable Google AdSense terms and conditions.”

[…]

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable confirms that this “secret group” may be real, “[this email] reads very similar to the one I personally received from Google back in February 2006.”

Blah, who cares.

FeedBurner co-founder and COO Steve Olechowski says on his blog that he’s currently working with the Googlers to integrate FeedBurner into AdSense.

So as most of you know by now, FeedBurner is now part of Google and I’m now working on the AdSense Product Management team helping integrate all we built over the last three years into Google.

AdSense for Feeds needs this one.

Another Google NonSense: The Inside AdSense blog is telling people to turn off their AdBlock, a popular Firefox extension that “allows users to prevent page elements, such as advertisements, from being downloaded and displayed.” [Wikipedia]

Google’s reasoning?

[W]e’ve found that Adblock Plus, an add-on that sometimes gets installed with Firefox, can prevent you from accessing your account on the AdSense homepage.

Now why would someone block a site that they want to visit so bad? (FYI: The site that serves the AdSense ads is totally unrelated to the AdSense homepage)

People install these extensions for a reason, Google.

UPDATE: Or shares his insight in the comment, “After the firefox update alot of adsense users were having problems logging into Adsense. When Google investigated they found that Adblock Plus was behind the problems people were having logging into adsense. Google did not tell adsense users not to use Adblock, they only said to shut it off *before logging in*. If it’s giving people problems to log in then that makes alot of sense.” My bad.

YouTube now shows video ads in a new way…

[via InsideGoogle->Mashable]

When Google AdSense’s new referral program was announced back in March, it was only available to beta users (I think I was one of them).

AdSense’s new referral program is pay-per-action, that means AdSense users will get pay only when certain actions had occurred, such as purchasing products from the advertiser’s site or filling out a form. The ads can be in the form of text links or image.

The Inside AdSense Blog announced yesterday that the program will be opened to all AdSense publishers in referrals supported languages. I know English is one of them. You can find more about this program on their support center.

I also want to make a quick announcement here that I will be removing ads from this site (except for the feed) for an indefinite amount of time. Of course, if you want to have your ads up on this site, I would be glad to know.

The Inside AdSense Blog announced today that they have updated several sections of the AdSense program policy.

• AdSense publishers is now required to comply with the Page Quality Guidelines.
• Users can now place up to three link units on one page.

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land reports that Google’s Google Webmaster guidelines has also been updated. Here are some of the quality principles from the guideline.

• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.

At the Google Developer Day London Edition yesterday, Andrew Eland, lead engineer on Google Maps in Zurich, announced that AdSense for the Maps API is coming soon.

The marker on the map looks slightly different than the normal ones, and when clicked on show a sponsored link. Developers are allowed to chose whether they want ads on the map, and if so how many ads to display. Google created this to allow developers to monetise their mashups, and if users do click through, the revenue for that ad will be shared.

Let’s hope that it won’t be annoying, popping out everywhere on the map…

[via gSpy]