Today, in the spirit of greater transparency with AdSense publishers, we’re sharing the revenue shares for our two main AdSense products — AdSense for content and AdSense for search.

As you may already know, AdSense is comprised of several products. The most popular are AdSense for content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside web content, and AdSense for search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. Since AdSense for content and AdSense for search offer publishers different services, the revenue shared with publishers differs for each of these products.

AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed. (more…)

A Las Vegas man will be sentenced in federal court in San Jose in November for carrying out a crime known as “cookie stuffing” against the online auction site eBay.

Christopher Kennedy, 28, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge James Ware on Thursday to one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud. He will be sentenced by Ware on Nov. 1.

U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello said Kennedy admitted in the plea that he created and sold a cookie-stuffing program on his website between January and November 2009.

The program was known as “saucekit” and Kennedy’s website was www.saucekit.com. (more…)

Every year has been the year of mobile since 2001 – every advertising publication, major speaker talks about what is the next big thing in mobile, year after year. I actually believe that 2010-2011 will see the biggest growth in the mobile industry, especially in revenue growth for third party companies. Affilaites, Advertising networks will see new mobile offers that expand the reach of advertising and production beyond the “normal” web and challenge advertisers and websites to think beyond the box. Mobile is no longer separate from the web, but now is an extension of the web, so the markets that have already engaged users online will be easily transferred to mobile. Here are a few thoughts on where this market needs to go:

1)      Mobile Offers: Expect that more and more products, offers and clients will be producing mobile pages. If you are looking to advertise to the mobile market, especially on the direct response side, you better create something that appeals to mobile users. No users wants to click on an advertisement, then go to a webpage they must resize, scroll side to side, or unable to read. If you are in the direct response field, this is more important – small pages, fast loading time and easy to fill out will be the focus. If you can collect a bit of information (first name, email) in a page, and then send out emails and collect more information over time, this will be a first level of engagement of any users. (more…)

In the advertising industry overall, revenues generated by direct and brand advertising are roughly split 50/50. But in the online world, where direct advertising is represented mostly by search and email ads and brand advertising by graphical display ads, the split is closer to 70/30 in favor of direct ads.

Last year, with the economy down, the display portion of the U.S. online advertising industry had a particularly rough time. Total revenues in 2009 were down 5.2 percent to $7.5 billion, estimates JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan in a new Internet industry report. But he forecasts that in 2010 U.S. display advertising will rebound 10.5 percent to $8.3 billion, buoyed by a rising economy and actions to reduce the glut of display ad inventory for higher quality sites and content. For instance, both AOL and CBS are making moves to remove their premium ad inventory from ad networks where prices get beaten down to the lowest common denominator.

As the industry moves away from plain-vanilla CPM ads—which lead to banner blindness—and towards a variety of better-performing ad formats (including sponsorships, behavioral targeting, and more timely display ads), that should help lift revenues as well. (more…)

This:
Pirates of Silicon Valley – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Then this:
What Happens When Apple Passes Microsoft In Value? Yes, When.

Am I the only one waiting for the sequel here?

Even as the buzz builds toward the April 3rd ship date of the iPad, Apple is preparing to announce its “next big thing” — a new personalized, mobile advertising system that could well be called the “iAd” — Online Media Daily has learned. The new ad platform, which will be officially unveiled to Madison Avenue on April 7th, has been described as “revolutionary” and “our next big thing” by Apple chief Steve Jobs, according to executives familiar with the plan.

Precise details of the system and its features could not be discerned at presstime (and calls to Apple had not been returned), but it is believed to have been built on top of Quattro, the mobile advertising developer Apple acquired in January for nearly $300 million, and it is expected to be the first real battle of a Silicon Valley Holy War between Apple and arch frenemy Google that is shifting its front line to Madison Avenue.

The war has been mounting ever since Google introduced its Android mobile operating system to compete with Apple’s iPhone, and agreed to acquire mobile ad firm AdMob for $750 million, but it is expected to reach ballistic proportions following Apple’s April 7th announcement, which insiders say will be every bit as important as other recent marketplace introductions, including the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad launches. (more…)

We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

(SEC filings are public financial documents and contain a wealth of information for those willing to wade through them. For example, much of the information in our Google infographic was extracted from SEC filings. All publicly traded companies are required to file these documents.)

Google’s own words about its competition

So who and what does Google consider to be its competition these days? Here are Google’s very own words, quoted directly from their latest SEC filing. Emphasis added by us:

We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, particularly from companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising. We face competition from:

• Traditional search engines, such as Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation’s Bing.
• Vertical search engines and e-commerce sites, such as WebMD (for health queries), Kayak (travel queries), Monster.com (job queries), and Amazon.com and eBay (commerce). We compete with these sites because they, like us, are trying to attract users to their web sites to search for product or service information, and some users will navigate directly to those sites rather than go through Google.
• Social networks, such as Facebook, Yelp, or Twitter. Some users are relying more on social networks for product or service referrals, rather than seeking information through traditional search engines. (more…)

Yahoo announced they have removed the BETA from the Yahoo Search Marketing Desktop client.

Yahoo Pete, Yahoo’s search ad representative, said in both a WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums thread:

Just wanted to make you aware that our desktop editing tool, Search Marketing Desktop, is now available to most of our advertisers (eligibility is based on minimum monthly spend and a few other factors). Using SMD, it takes just a few clicks to modify multiple campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads at the same time.For more details, please visit our blog [ysmblog.com] or the SMD sign-up page [advertising.yahoo.com]. We’re also hosting a free webinar about SMD this coming Thursday–you can sign up through the link in the blog post.

Obviously, towards the end of this year or early next year, this tool will be terminated due to the Microsoft Yahoo deal – but hey, remove the beta label, why not.

For more information about the tool, please see here and for Thursday’s webminar click here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

Do you need to improve your AdWords Quality Score? Do you want to understand what Google wants from you as an advertiser in exchange for a decent Quality Score and lower click prices? Today I will teach you the ins and outs of the algorithm and show you how you can tweak your account and site to influence each Quality Score factor.

I am constantly surprised at how little advertisers really understand Quality Scores. If you put in a little effort, you can reap some very tangible benefits and come out leaps and bounds ahead of your competition.

On www.redflymarketing.com Dave Devis just posted one of the most interesting read about google QS where we finally get a clear picture on the differences between Search QS and Content QS.

The Opportunity.

Back in the good old days, AdWords was based on a pure auction-based model. If you bid more than another advertiser on a keyword, your ad would appear higher and ultimately get more clicks (and hopefully sales). Back in 2005 when Google introduced the Quality Score, it changed everything.
No longer could search results be flooded with irrelevant ads of those with massive budgets. Many advertisers were very upset, but a unique opportunity arose for those with smaller budgets and the inclination to put in a little hard work — perhaps people like you. With the refinement of the Quality Score algorithm and the great scam / affiliate flush of late 2009, there has never been a better opportunity for those advertisers with a quality product or service and a little time to try to understand Quality Score to really reap the rewards. Are you ready to learn more about Quality Score? Let’s get started. (more…)

The Guys at SearchEngineJournal have come out with an interesting list of what they think could be the secretely kept 200 Parameters in the Google Algorythm.

There you go:

Domain: 13 factors

1. Domain age;
2. Length of domain registration;
3. Domain registration information hidden/anonymous;
4. Site top level domain (geographical focus, e.g. com versus co.uk);
5. Site top level domain (e.g. .com versus .info);
6. Sub domain or root domain?
7. Domain past records (how often it changed IP);
8. Domain past owners (how often the owner was changed)
9. Keywords in the domain;
10. Domain IP;
11. Domain IP neighbors;
12. Domain external mentions (non-linked)
13. Geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools

Server-side: 2 factors

1. Server geographical location;
2. Server reliability / uptime

Architecture: 8 factors

1. URL structure;
2. HTML structure;
3. Semantic structure;
4. Use of external CSS / JS files;
5. Website structure accessibility (use of inaccessible navigation, JavaScript, etc);
6. Use of canonical URLs;
7. “Correct” HTML code (?);
8. Cookies usage; (more…)