Google out, Microsoft in for Digg

In a deal that boosts Microsoft Corp.'s plan to increase revenue from online advertising, the company will be the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on the popular Digg Inc. news site.

Microsoft also said it will work with Digg to develop new campaigns that combine advertising and technology for the site, and will collaborate with Digg's current advertising partner, Federated Media Publishing, to bring new programs to the site's users and advertisers. The deal's duration will be three years, the companies said.

Digg aggregates news stories from around the Web and lets users rate stories and recommend them to others with the popular "digg it" tag. More than 17 million unique users visit the site monthly, according to Digg.

Microsoft has been slowly building its efforts to become a stronger competitor in the fight for online advertising dollars, waging an uphill battle against market leader Google Inc. and others. This is the second partnership that Microsoft has unveiled in a little more than a week to boost its advertising presence. Last Tuesday, the company said it had added the ability for subscribers of its Office Live small-business hosted service to purchase paid-search advertising from portal Ask.com's s Ask Sponsored Listings.

Partnerships aren't the only way Microsoft is building its advertising strategy. The company is currently waiting for its $6 billion purchase of digital advertising and marketing services agency aQuantive Inc. to close, something the company said it expects to happen next month after a vote by aQuantive shareholders.

AdSense for Video Games?

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 will compete with IGA Worldwide and Double Fusion, which already participate in the $78 million in-game ad business.

Google unveils new widgets to help personalize maps

Google has announced new widgets called Mapplets that will let users gather data from multiple sources to personalize maps.

By adding mini-applications like real-time weather conditions or listings of local events, Google hopes to make it easier for non-technical users to easily build maps with dynamic content.

With the new Mapplets, a user looking for a home in Chicago could add Mapplets that display real estate listings and Chicago Transit Authority train lines, Tran said.

In a separate announcement, WeatherBug, which provides live local weather information online, said Wednesday that it has created a Mapplet for Google Maps that puts temperature markers on the map from WeatherBug's network of tracking stations and weather sensors worldwide.

Yet another acquisition by Google

Google Inc. agreed to acquire email security company Postini Inc. for $625 million in cash, in a deal that furthers the Internet giant's push into business software.

Postini, which has developed technology for protecting and managing email and instant messages, is based in San Carlos, Ca. The closely held company was founded in 1999 and has funding from August Capital and Mobius Venture Capital.

Postini is one of a host of small companies that offer Web-based services to help businesses clean their email of spam, viruses and other software-related problems. Microsoft Corp. acquired Postini rival FrontBridge Technologies Inc. in 2005 and Symantec Corp. bought another company in the area called Brightmail Inc. for more than $300 million in 2004.

Google has moved increasingly into the business software market by offering a suite of Web-based programs. Earlier this year, Google acquired a company with a Web-based word processor named Writely and released a Web-based spreadsheet application allowing users to collaborate online.

"With this transaction, we're reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes," said Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt in a press release.

The Mountain View, Ca. company, said Postini will become a wholly owned subsidiary and the deal is expected to close by the end of the third quarter.

Earlier this month, Google also agreed to acquire GrandCentral Communications Inc., a start-up that allows users to manage their existing phones and voicemail services over the Web.

Postini represents Google's third largest purchase, following the $1.76 billion purchase of YouTube and the $3.1 billion acquisition of online advertising service DoubleClick Inc.

Google gives away FeedBurner

Weeks after it paid $100 million for news-feed management company Feedburner, Google has removed all price tags from the company's services. Bloggers, podcasters, and other publishers can now use Feedburner's "PRO" tools - TotalStats and MyBrand - without paying a penny.

Google has a habit of purchasing popular web services and promptly making them completely free to customers. It did the same thing with Picasa, SketchUp, Urchin (now Google Analytics) and Keyhole (Google Earth).

"One of the many benefits that FeedBurner publishers will enjoy now that FeedBurner is part of the Google family is a little something we like to call, 'more for free!'" read the announcement on the official Feedburner blog.

TotalStats provides feed publishers with extensive statistics, including the number of people who've viewed or clicked on each piece of a feed's content, while MyBrand gives publishers the power to serve feeds from their own customized url. Though both previously for-pay services are now completely free, publishers do have to actively sign-up for these tools in order to use them.

And ever wonder how Google will make money off this FeedBurner purchase? One word - ADVERTISING. FeedBurner just happen to offer the web's largest RSS feed and blog ad network :)

Google expands its Code Search site

Google has updated its Google Code Search site for finding publicly available source code, adding greater coverage and improvements in ranking and access.

Launched in October 2006, Google Code Search enables developers to locate source code on the Web, searching through billions of lines of code.

"Today we made some updates to Code Search that will hopefully make it even easier to find the code you're looking for," said Google software engineer Aleksander Fedorynski in a blog entry Thursday about the improvements.

Coverage capabilities now include indexing of individual files and code snippets from all over the Web, Google said. Previously, only complete archives, such as .zip,.tar, and repositories, including CVS and Subversion, were indexed.

To improve ranking, Google has amended Code Search so class and method definitions now appear closer to the top of search results for certain queries.

Also, users now can access Code Search through several international domains, including Brazil, China, France, and Russia.

Right after the launch, Google's Code Search was criticized as a potential resource for hackers looking to find bugs, password information, and proprietary code.

{source}

The Ad World According to Google

For those who are still wondering what all the hoopla surrounding the Google-DoubleClick merger is about, Google has chosen to explain. The essay posted on Google’s official blog is, of course, a bit self-serving, as it is a description of how the merger, if it goes through, will benefit everyone from online advertisers to publishers and consumers. In particular, there is no mention of the antitrust concerns raised by some companies, which are currently being reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission, or of the potential privacy pitfalls brought up by some advocacy groups.

Still, if you want to understand how ads are bought and sold online, if you want to know the difference between a text-based contextual ad and a display ad, if you care to learn the difference between AdSense and an ad server, the post provides as good an explanation of the online advertising world – or at least Google’s version of it.

YouTube still has more visitors than rival sites combined

YouTube, which has had to pull copyrighted videos off its site after legal attacks by some big media franchises, has enjoyed a surge in U.S. audience share that leaves it far larger than the next 64 video-sharing sites combined, a survey found.

The U.S. market share of visits to YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion last November, rose 70% from January through May, online audience measurement firm Hitwise Inc. said in the survey published Wednesday.

By contrast, visits to the next 64 largest sites tracked by Hitwise rose only 8% during 2007's first five months.

"As of May 2007, YouTube's market share was 50% greater than those 64 sites combined," Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott said in a summary of her firm's data.

YouTube's share of the U.S. online video market was 60.2% in May, according to Hitwise. Its closest rival, News Corp.'s MySpace Videos site, had 16.08% of market share, the survey of Web surfing habits showed.

YouTube's sister site, Google Video, held 7.81%, while Yahoo had 2.77% and Microsoft's MSN, 2.09%, according to the study.

Start-up Metacafe ranked No. 8 in U.S. visitors to video sites with 1.07%, Time Warner's AOL Media had 0.94% and Veoh was No. 10 at 0.86%, Hitwise said.

Viacom filed a copyright infringement suit against YouTube in March seeking more than $1 billion in damages and demanded that YouTube take down thousands of segments from its popular programs, including The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park.

read the whole article on usatoday

Google Continues Search Gains At Yahoo's Expense

Internet search figures for the month of May showed that U.S. queries rose 11.2% year-over-year, with Google Inc. continuing to grab market share. The Web search giant now has a record high 50.7% of the U.S. market, according to global Internet information provider comScore.

Google has been consistently trending upward in search, which could prevent Yahoo! Inc.’s attempt to boost its share of revenue in this market, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney said in a note to clients.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share of the search market fell to 26.4%, its lowest level in more than three years. Microsoft remained at 10.3% and the Ask Network dipped slightly to 5%.

Google's Pay-per-action launching world wide expansion

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 will run 'limited' ads on Google

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."

article from usatoday

Apple's iPhone to access YouTube content

Apple Inc.'s widely anticipated music and video playing iPhone will allow subscribers to wirelessly stream material from Google Inc.'s popular video sharing site YouTube, Apple said on Wednesday.

YouTube has begun encoding its videos in a new format to improve quality and save battery life when viewed over wireless devices.

The iPhone will be the first mobile device to use the new format, Apple said. More than 10,000 videos will be available on the iPhone when it hit stores on June 29, with more material added each week.

Google Video Now Turning Into Video Search Engine

When Google spent $1.6 billion to acquire YouTube, it was left with the inevitable question: "What do we do with Google Video?" Google Video had lagged in popularity behind sites like YouTube and Revver, but the community uploading videos to Google Video staunchly opposed any notion of simply shutting the service down. They complained that Google Video's uploading and video-editing tools were much better than those of any other video-hosting service, and that embedding and streaming video from Google Video wasn't as buggy and problematic as it was on YouTube. Still, it didn't make sense for Google to operate two different video-hosting services, especially when it now owned the market leader. So last Thursday Google announced that it had finally decided on what it would do with Google Video: Turn it into part video-hosting and part video-search.


You can still upload videos to Google Video, and you can still edit and tag them, so the service is pulling double duty for the time being. It's clear, however, that Google will eventually make Google Video a video search service. Whether that means that all of the videos wind up making their way to YouTube or they'll vanish entirely remains to be seen.

Preview Adsense advertisements through Adsense Sandbox?

Have you tried Adsense Sandbox? This Google Adsense Preview Tool will display sample Google ads, based on standard AdSense targeting and filtering. Unlike the Official Adsense Preview Tool add-on that works only with IE browser, this online Adsense Preview Tool works across all web browsers including IE, Firefox, Opera or Safari.

Other than 20 text ads, the Adsense Preview tool will also show the related Adlinks and Rich Text Ads (Images and Video) that will appear on your webpages for visitors in various countries. Ad formats include Leaderboard, Skyscraper, Rectangle and Square (200x200).

Getting the best of both worlds at same time!

Are you using Google as your main search engine, how about Yahoo? How about searching on both websites at the same time? Yes... you can with Searchboth.com. These two big names in web search has joined forces along with AT&T, owner of Yellow Pages Corp. - the people that came up with the tool for users to search both google and yahoo at the same time. When a user types a search word, Searchboth displays results of both search engines in a split screened frame.


This is a nice feature especially for users doing research, it gives them more variety and they can easily compare the search results from both web sites. According to online polls and blogs cited by the YellowPages, the majority of tech savvy and non-tech savvy American search engine users are crossed between either Google or Yahoo. Each show the same results, but on different pages. Some results may come up on Google’s first page; however, the same results could be on Yahoo’s second, third or fourth page, or vice versa. Not the first one, similar to YaGoohoogle (which seems to be defunct ) from awhile back, and extremely similar to GahooYoogle, this seems to be a nicely built one, with capability to perform images, news, videos and more searches instead of just the default web search.

Searchboth.com is managed by IdeaLabz, and they confirmed that they are also planning on adding MSN, Ask.com and LiveSearch to the available choices in the near future.

More adsense link units for your web pages!

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.

This is great news to publishers especially to me (hehe), though my ad for contents have higher click values, most of my clicks are coming from link units. And besides that, link units for me are easier to set up than other ad units because of their small size and they can easily fit on a web page.

YouTube adds a new feature for their embedded videos

I read that YouTube recently updated the interface for their embedded videos. Though lately most of my videos were uploaded at Dailymotion, some of my early video ads can still be found at YouTube. So just for curiousity I tried to put 1 real estate video w/c i uploaded to YouTube, and pasted it to a sample page. (see image below)


What happens is when you click the "menu" button on the bottom right corner of the screen, the current video shrinks and an array of related videos will pop up below the screen. Hovering and clicking on any video will open it on the same player. A very cool feature indeed, because if like me, you have a set of videos for say, different condominiums, all my other videos will most likely appear below so viewers and readers don't have to go to the next web page just to see the other movies. But the problem is not only my videos will appear, but most likely videos by other real estate brokers/agents (competitors) which in fact happened in the sample above. So though it is a neat feature by YouTube, there's also a risk that I might lose some prospective clients if videos by other property agents will suddenly appear. And with that i'm still sticking to my embedded Dailymotion vids :)

Since Google acquired YouTube, others say it's an attempt of monetizing with YouTube... For the next several months, people will get very used to using the related video tool that was just introduced. As soon as it becomes second nature for viewers to use it, we should start to see sponsored results mixed with these related videos. Pretty clever, don't you think?

a click or not a click? what's your "impression"?

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.

Google to put ads in RSS feeds

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."

click here for the full article from Techworld.com