Google is planning to take the gaming world by storm, according to a story in The Seattle Post Intelligencer, which reports that the company is working on AdSense for video games.
Dubbed AdSense for Games, Google's new application, when launched, could be a significant player in a fast-growing market, according to a Yankee Group study that predicts in-game advertising will exceed $971 million by 2011.
Google announced that they have launched the worldwide expansion of its pay-per-action advertising beta. Pay-per-action is a pricing model that allows advertisers to pay only when a pre-defined action is completed on their site, such as when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action. Google launched the beta of Pay-per-action in March. "Pay-per-action advertising helped our company make the most of our marketing budget," said Alexandre Douzet, Executive Vice President and General Manager, TheLadders.com, the leading $100k+ job search web site and an early adopter of Google's pay-per-action advertising model. "At TheLadders.com, we are big proponents of marketing efficiency, so the ability to supplement our existing cost-per-click campaigns with a model that rewards qualified leads makes a lot of sense to us." Now that the launch is live, advertisers in the beta will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can now create pay-per-action campaigns. “Going forward, advertisers who have enabled AdWords conversion tracking and received more than 500 conversions from their CPC and CPM-based campaigns in the past 30 days will be automatically added to the beta on a rolling basis,” Google said. Pay-per-action ads are only shown on publisher sites in the Google content network, also known as Google AdSense. Publishers in the Google content network may select between individual ads, a shopping cart of ads, or a specific keyword that is relevant to their site's content. “These publisher-selected ad units contain only pay-per-action ads, and therefore, they do not compete in the auction against CPC or CPM-based ads, which are served in separate AdSense for content ad units,” Google added in a statement. Pay-per-action is by some as an answer to click fraud with the currently common pay-per-click system. Advertisers complain that they pay for ads that were not legitimately clicked on by potential customers. Fraudulent clicks can be generated by people paid to click ads repeatedly or through automated software programs. The goal is to run out the advertiser’s ad budget, and lower their position. It can also be used to drive up the cost of keywords in a system.
[source]
EBay said Friday the online auction leader plans to resume Web advertising on a limited basis with Google, but plans to use alternative ad services to a greater degree.
EBay, which uses Google advertising to promote its online auctions and is one of the biggest buyers of keyword ads on Google's leading pay-per-click advertising system, had canceled all Google ads 10 days ago in protest over the Web search company's bid to woo eBay customers to a rival payment system.
Instead, eBay plans to rely to a greater degree of competing advertising systems from Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, and IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com.
Hani Durzy, a spokesman for San Jose, California-based eBay, said his company would begin advertising on Google again later on Friday but that: "I will tell you it will be in a much more limited way than it was before."
As i was about to make an ad for content to one of my sites, i passed by Google's adsense blog and was suprised at their new policy updates... Other than requiring AdSense publishers to comply with the spirit of Google's Page Quality Guidelines, the real good news is that you can now put 2 more ad link units! Making the allowed ad units per page up to 9 => 3 Adsense for Content units, 3 link units, 2 search boxes and 2 referral units...
The other noteworthy update: now you can place up to three link units on a page. As we've noted in the past, link units are a great way to provide relevant, user-friendly ads in hard-to-fit locations on your site. With the new opportunity to place three link units -- and the plethora of link unit formats -- we hope you'll find great ways of incorporating this unique ad format on your site.
There's no doubt the online advertising market is very well increasing as more advertisers shift to the internet to sell and promote their products and services. Marketers are rebelling against old media as more and more listeners, viewers and readers connect to the internet, advertisers are obviously following the suit.
But with these comes issues, some advertisers and web sites are having some troubles because they can't agree on what they should be counting. Most debates point to "clicks" on an ad. Advertisers argue that they should be billed only for clicks that bring customers to their Web sites to shop around. They don't want to pay for clicks made by accident or by, say, malicious competitors trying to make them exhaust their marketing budget. They also worry about unscrupulous Web site operators who click on the ads on their own sites - sometimes employing computer "bots" to do the job - so they can put more money in their pockets. But sellers of web advertising say it's not easy to distinguish the good clicks from the bad.
One of Google's business product manager wrote in a recent blog that their servers can accurately count clicks on ads, but the system cannot know what the intent of the clicking user was when they made that click. True. Thats why the big names like Google and Yahoo are said to be working on new technologies to sniff out phony clicks. I guess they should really work on this and make some kind of standard on measuring w/c clicks are counted and not. Because if you scare away the advertisers, publishers/web site owners who run these ads will definitely be affected in the end.
Good news to us bloggers, Google once again boosts it's ad network and publishing services by recently acquiring FeedBurner, which offers publishing and advertising services for blogs and content syndication feeds . "FeedBurner, which has over 400,000 publishers on its network, will beef up Google's own AdSense publisher network, particularly among blogs, where FeedBurner is stronger than Google, said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google, during a press conference. Likewise, Google advertisers will benefit from an expanded ad inventory and ad distribution platform. Finally, FeedBurner shares Google's philosophy of helping end users find information online, with FeedBurner focused on blogs and feeds and Google on search. 'We think this will be a win for users, publishers and advertisers on the internet,' she said."
a bit busy lately, yesterday I received an e-mail from google accepting my adsense application (yey!)... i'm very excited all i did was create ad units, link units, search boxes and referral buttons all over my sites....
I also installed joomla, a content management system w/c i will use for my new abortretryfail website. I browsed through different free templates and found this one cool looking format... check it out soon :)
